Long Views and Acts of Translation: Finding Usable Pasts for Sustainable Fashion

In October 2023, cultural historian Annebella Pollen met with Amy Twigger Holroyd, fashion designer, maker, researcher and writer, to discuss their shared interests in sustainable fashion strategies, and specifically to consider how the past might be used as a resource for addressing present-day problems. The conversation was prompted by two of Amy’s recent projects. The first, Fashion Fictions—established in 2020 and an ongoing experiment—invites participants to generate and experience fictional visions of alternative fashion cultures and systems. It does this through a three-stage process, beginning with the composition of a short speculative flash fiction that imagines a parallel world with sustainable and satisfying fashion cultures and systems. The next stage adds detail to the initial speculation and manifests it in a visual or material prototype; the final stage moves further towards a fleshed-out world via embodied enactment. The second of Amy’s projects that provided a prompt for the discussion is her 2023 edition of the Bloomsbury Academic book, Historical Perspectives on Sustainable Fashion, co-authored with Jennifer Farley Gordon and Colleen Hill.