Fashion Fictions: call for fashion theorists and historians
Fashion Fictions brings people together to generate, experience and reflect on engaging fictional visions of alternative fashion cultures and systems. The aim is to understand how radically sustainable fashion cultures and systems might be imagined and experienced, and discover which historical or contemporary real-world examples we can draw on in the process of exploring them.
The project has a three-stage structure, with Stage 1 inviting people to submit concise written outlines of worlds in which invented historical junctures have led to familiar-yet-strange sustainable fashion cultures and systems. At Stage 2’s prototyping workshops, diverse groups of participants will add complexity to a selection of these fictions, while in Stage 3’s ‘everyday dress’ projects, participants will performatively enact the prototyped cultures and systems.
In order to strengthen links between sustainable fashion research and fashion theory and history, I am inviting theorists and historians to participate in all three stages of the research (alongside sustainable fashion researchers, fashion and textile practitioners and ‘everyday fashion participants’, i.e. wearers) and share their expertise by highlighting theories and insights that could be usefully applied to the imagined cultures and systems, and contemporary and historical real-world examples that relate to the fictional worlds.
Participation could involve:
authoring a Stage 1 fiction and/or responding to the fictions submitted by others, between now and August 2021
taking part in a 2-day prototyping workshop in Nottingham and follow-up ‘everyday dress’ project, between October 2021 and April 2022
attending a one-day workshop to reflect on these experiences with other theorists and historians, in summer 2022
contributing a written reflective/analytical response for inclusion in a scholarly book, with further publication opportunities encouraged.
These activities are subject to funding; if successful, all travel, accommodation and subsistence expenses will be covered. While this call is targeted at UK-based academics, I am keen to hear from people outside the UK who would be interested in getting involved.
Fashion theorists and historians from any disciplinary background and any career stage are invited to express interest in participating in the project by emailing Dr Amy Twigger Holroyd, Associate Professor of Fashion and Sustainability at Nottingham Trent University, by Friday 11 September: amy-twigger.holroyd@ntu.ac.uk