APOLOGIES FOR SOME SOUND ISSUES RIGHT AT THE START AND END OF THIS RECORDING.

Amy Twigger Holroyd is Associate Professor of Fashion and Sustainability at Nottingham School of Art & Design (website). Through design-led participatory research, she explores plural possibilities for post-growth fashion systems: alternative ways of living with our clothes that meet our fundamental human needs and respect ecological limits.

Her main project pursuing this is Fashion Fictions, which invites you to to imagine, explore and enact enticing alternative fashion worlds. Stage One: Worlds is to write an enticing, possible parallel world (as I type, there are 213 which you can still add to here). Stage Two: Explorations is to generate visual and material is to prototypes of those worlds (eg a mocked-up WhatsApp chat). Stage Three: Enactments is to try and experience the prototyped Worlds. 

Our conversation covers: 

-How fashion (the clothes people wear, and how those are created) are an expression of society.

-Her motivation: using participatory fiction to expand the sense of possibility, because so many people feel hemmed in.

-She's currently excited by the realisation that we can write stories, and then, by enacting them, we can make them real. It is a sort of magic. 

By the way, the sound problems come from having to use the back-up recording. I hope they don't interfer with your enjoyment too much.

Links

Keep & Share

Book Amy co-authored: Historical Perspectives on Sustainable Fashion.

Arturo Escobar -- Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds

The Great Transition Initiative, expressed in a book called 'Journey to Earthland' by Paul Raskin.

Diana Wynne Jones' series with numbered worlds is Chrestomanci.

Kate Fletcher

Timings

0:51 - Q1 What are you doing now? And how did you get there?

12:43 -- BONUS QUESTION: What is your project, Fashion Fictions?

22:41 -- BONUS QUESTION: What are the themes in your findings from Fashion Futures?

29:41 - Q2. What is the future you are trying to create, and why?

33:58 -- Q3. What are your priorities for the next few years, and why?

41:10 - Q4. If someone was inspired to follow those priorities, what should they do next?

44:31 - Q5. If your younger self was starting their career now, what advice would you give them?

46:12 - Q6. Who would you nominate to answer these questions, because you admire their approach?

48:02 - Q7. Is there anything else important you feel you have to say?

More details here.

Twitter: Powerful_Times

Website hub: here.

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Thank you for listening! -- David