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

annebella

…And people might not know it all as well.

amy

Yes. Exactly. So that's already a big question. And then, once we have identified parts of the past that we think we should be able to learn something from for the future, then how do we do that? How do we use it or learn from it or interpret it or translate it?

annebella

These are some of the core questions for us to think with in our conversation today, even if we don’t have all the answers. To link to your specific projects, firstly, how do past events and practices find a place in Fashion Fictions?

amy

One of the points of Fashion Fictions is to try and use the method as a hook to pull out people’s personal memories, or family stories, or knowledge of parallels from history. It pulls out stories that wouldn't otherwise cross my path. And they probably wouldn't otherwise cross the path of practice-oriented, future-oriented, ‘sustainable fashion’ people. All the way through that's been one of the intentions, but the question of what you then do with it is still unresolved for me.

Annebella

You’ve had a more focused opportunity to centre the uses of history for sustainable design practitioners in your recent revisions to your co-authored book, Historical Perspectives on Sustainable Fashion. What reflections emerged from that project?

I’ve always loved that phrase, ‘There’s no such thing as “away”’, as in ‘I threw it away’. That throwaway mentality, Cockayne shows, has been around for a really long time.

amy

You are reminding me of when I did my PhD research and looked at the history of hand knitting. My uninformed impression had been that everybody could hand knit in the past and that it was totally widespread. Reading about the history of hand knitting, especially the push for women to hand knit socks for the troops in the First World War, I was surprised that there had to be mass education campaigns because not that many people knew how. I’d made this simplistic assumption because it seemed that my grandmother and everyone of her generation could knit. It really surprised me that there had to be a purposeful campaign to share this skill in the past. Handknitting has come in waves; it is not the case that everyone knew how to do it once, and then it went away.

annebella

One of the things that Alex Esculapio and I particularly wanted to do with this Special Issue of Fashion Studies, and the Fashioning Sustainment conference that preceded it, was to provide wider histories and contexts for sustainability practices. Alex had observed, with some frustration, that sustainability debates at present seem to be coming from the Western fashion industry, who seem to think it is a new invention. Some of those who discuss it from that perspective seem to assume that it’s a modern issue that has only been around for about 20 years. She was interested in looking at the long roots of resourcefulness outside the industry, looking across the twentieth century, at everyday life, and outside of the West. And we also wanted to challenge some assumptions about the historical models that are more frequently drawn on.

For example, in an essay in this Special Issue, Bethan Bide has revisited the British Make Do and Mend campaign of the Second World War to show that it was a scheme that actually increased consumption. It was, in fact, useful for making money for haberdashery retailers. Sometimes it wasn't that much about reusing what you actually had. And some of the sewing suggestions provided in the literature were quite outlandish and not at all practical. Bide shows the fault lines of the campaign behind the enticing headline; she argues that it's actually a very poor model for present day practices, even though it's frequently held up as an ideal.

It has been excellent, too, to reflect on repair and resourcefulness cultures outside of capitalist consumerism; for example, through the work of Iryna Kucher whose article focuses on historical repair practices in Soviet societies. We are also happy to have Eric Larsen’s essay on Japanese boro because we keenly wanted perspectives from outside Euro-America; we are acutely aware that resourcefulness practices are a daily reality for the global majority. I know that you have observed that Historical Perspectives on Sustainable Fashion is mostly U.S.-centric because of the book’s origins in an exhibition at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, so many of the examples were drawn from the museum’s Eurocentric collection.

Annebella

Well, perhaps the interesting thing about the Fashion Fictions project is that it’s not necessarily about historical or geographical actuality. However, I’ve noticed that you ask in the instructions for contributors to describe a set of circumstances, then describe a turning point, and to identify a moment when something changes. There’s a shift, and as a result, perhaps, a practice or a product becomes outlawed or, as a result of some twist in history, new practices and products become desirable. That’s my understanding of how a Fashion Fictions world is constructed; is that right?

amy

There is an established method of speculation, which is about identifying a point in the past and then imagining what could have happened if that real-life thing happened differently; a projecting-forward from that historical moment. But what I’ve realized, given that the whole structure of Fashion Fictions is meant to be about helping people to break out of restrictions on their imagination, is that people quite often find that projecting forward from a real-life historical point is difficult because you know what really happened. It’s quite hard to go: What if this other thing occurred? So, I generally guide people to freely invent the parallel world that they want, and then invent a fanciful back story that explains how it arose. In doing that, sometimes people root the back story in something that they know happened in the past. And sometimes they wholly invent something that happened, so it’s not dependent on having historical knowledge.

If you’re asking people to project forward from something in the past, it becomes dependent on historical knowledge because you must know what has happened in the past. Students, for example, might find it hard to do if they don’t feel that they have enough of a general sense of history. Sometimes people do refer to historical things in Fashion Fictions. Let’s say, for example, that Make Do and Mend continued; let’s say that rationing continued. Sometimes people imagine that a law came in on a certain date that enforced this or that practice; that is an easy device for imagining a different system to the one we inhabit.

But where real-life history tends to come out more in Fashion Fictions is in people’s responses to the worlds. It can be the case, when you read a world, or you hear someone talking about it, that you say, “You’re presenting that as a speculation, but that’s really what it was like in X, Y or Z.” That’s what I mean by the fictions being hooks for real-life histories. I love it when that happens because there isn’t a reason why anybody would otherwise throw those stories in my direction; there’s no reason for them to throw one of those stories in anyone’s direction as it’s just one of many things that they happen to know about but that doesn’t usually get articulated.

It can be a criticism of speculative design that people are speculating on things that are reality in other cultures, or down the road, whether that is in different geographical locations, or where people live in different socioeconomic circumstances, or in the past. And I totally get that criticism. But I also think it can be a feature rather than a bug, that you say, “I imagine this…” and people say, “Well, that’s already the case...” Because then you can say, “Really? Tell me more!”

Annebella

Do you have an example in mind?

Amy

There was a Fashion Fictions world that I wrote about community laundries; imagining people choosing to wash their clothes outside the home in a communal way as a social get-together, and the group who explored that world in a Stage 2 workshop—where people create a prototype to represent life in one of the fictional worlds—included a young woman from India who was studying in Nottingham and had lived in New York City. She was able to refer both to experiences in India of women washing their clothes together on the riverbank and to living in New York, where few people have a washing machine in their apartment and people routinely go to the laundromat together. She also told us that people form laundry WhatsApp groups with friends in the area. There were white-wash groups where you would get together to put your whites together to make up a full load! I would never otherwise have known this, even though I might consider New York as not very distant from my own culture in industrialised and urban Britain. But while I went to the laundrette when I was a student, in my adult experience it is considered a norm to have a washing machine in your home.

Annebella

Yes, I considered it as a moment of adult achievement when I got a washing machine. I felt like I had done something very grown up. For a long time I didn't have a freezer; I didn't have a washing machine; I didn't have a garden. When I got those things, I felt I was establishing myself as a fully-formed person with the requisite and normative Western appliances and spaces. Private washing machines become status markers in some cultures, so that’s a great example of how Fashion Fictions can help you unthink norms that are in fact very geographically and historically sited.

amy

So, I see it as a positive thing when the discussion about Fashion Fictions worlds precipitates the volunteering of histories and experiences that we might otherwise not know. We analysed the data from several Stage 2 workshops that I ran for mentions of things from the real world. There’s so many of them. It is a whirlwind of references. In making sense of a fiction, you inevitably draw on your existing experience of the world, saying “Oh, is it a bit like this?” People drew parallels for speculative fashion fictions with video libraries, Tinder, harvest festivals, New Age Travellers, communal pianos in train stations, 1930s fashion shows, and The Sound of Music!

Annebella

I guess it is like historical science fiction. The imagined future that science fiction produces is always so informed by the time and place in which it was written. You know, if you read science fiction from the 1930s, H. G. Wells for example, it's always steeped in British interwar values and preoccupations even if he is trying to visualise something entirely different. It's almost like there's a temporal limit on what is imaginable. But to row back, how did Tinder inform a Fashion Fiction?

amy

The author imagined a service to match users with bits of garment in a world of spare parts.

Annebella

So, this was a matching practice, like where you get matched with a romantic or sexual partner?

amy

Yeah. So, you are you looking for the perfect sleeve, for example, and you just keep swiping till you find the right sleeve that you want for your garment! Real-world examples help people to make sense of the things that are imagined. They operate as shorthand when a real-world parallel is made to an imagined world.

Annebella

That example is interesting too because clothes and relationships are both so intertwined with love and desire; they are both about finding things that match you and reflect you! It's very funny.

I think that it is very interesting, what you said about people pointing out that some of the imagined worlds already exist. My sense was that some of those observations are criticisms, but you've shown how, from a more positive perspective, that's a way of people sharing different experiences and knowledges. When you and I jointly ran a 2021 Fashion Fictions workshop for fashion historians and theorists, that was one of the limitations of the form that was identified. Colleagues pointed out that some worlds were describing practices that the rest of the world has been doing forever. So, it is a cautionary lesson about being careful about cultural appropriation, and for privileged people to take care not to do what the dress historian Lou Taylor calls ‘class vacationing’ (in another article in a previous issue of Fashion Studies). It is something to be mindful of, certainly, but when that conflict arises, you note that people might use it as a way of talking about different and shared practices. It's then a moment to learn from rather than a moment to shut down.

Amy

Through talking to people who run their own Fashion Fictions activities, in different settings, including in the Global South, I’ve mentioned this phenomenon, that what someone imagines in one place might be the reality elsewhere. Particularly, in Colombia, at University of the Andes, they've been doing a lot of Fashion Fictions stuff. Part of that work has involved looking at the fictions and then interpreting them through a Colombian lens because they were conscious that there are different contexts and meanings depending on where people are and where they've contributed from. So those translations make sense of the fictions, to reflect on how they work in their geographical context.

I also think that if we get too worried about those concerns, then we stop doing any speculating. It might be an unthinkable system; for example, for me, now, to imagine a situation where I am forced to have a really restricted wardrobe. I think that still has value as an imagined exercise, even though in Nottingham, my own city, we have a clothes bank that distributes clothes to people in the way that a food bank does. We know that there is clothing poverty, not just in the world, but in our city. I think we can all only speculate from where we are. I've come to accept that the thing that we imagine might be reality somewhere else. For example, students in Singapore were imagining an enticing, wonderful world where it would be OK to have loads of tattoos and people wouldn't judge you for it because their experience, presumably, of living in Singapore is that that is not the case. And then I'm sitting here in England reading it…

Annebella

…where there are people in positions of some authority—from academics to police—covered in tattoos!

Amy

Yes, so the experience works both ways. But I think there is a difference, too, between imagining greater freedom and openness versus imagining austerity and restriction.

Annebella

I recall you observing previously, from your first analysis of the worlds people have written for Fashion Fictions, that you'd identified dominant themes, and that restriction was notable among the emerging patterns: people imagining legal restraints, or restraints brought about by a lack of resources. There seemed to be a dominant desire for contributors to imagine how we might function if, for whatever reason, we had to survive with fewer things.

Amy

I think that must be on the table as something for people who are in a culture of seeming abundance. It should be something that we are able to think through without class guilt.

Annebella

Because ultimately, the value of the exercise is to imagine the fundamental opposite that you have to begin with, for example, if you're in a culture where there's just endless oversupply, right?

Amy

Yes, and the challenge is navigating that without romanticising the hardship and the experiences of people who have lived through, or are living through, that as their reality. It is a particular challenge if you don't have much historical knowledge. It is really easy to make those historical assumptions, isn't it? Thinking, for example, “People were really good at being resourceful with clothes in the Second World War. They did this… They kept that…” But that's where we need to question our assumptions.

When I started my Reknit Revolution work, where I developed techniques for reworking existing knitted garments, I didn’t start by referring to historical contexts. I was approaching it as a designer and maker, but obviously I recognised that there were historical precedents. I was conscious that people have done reknitting in the past and that was part of my introduction if I talked to people about it. I emphasised, “This isn't a new thing; please don’t get the impression that I think it is a new thing. I’m not inventing how to rework knitting. I'm trying to help us remember what we used to know how to do, but we have to do it in a different way.” I looked at World War II books and earlier—and later too, although these were more about how to fix your knitting if, for example, jumpers came out too wide or too long or too short, and how to fix it without unravelling it and reknitting the whole thing.

The earlier ones might, for example, instruct you about how to add a new collar and cuffs onto your old jumper; they were very nicely done. And so, firstly I did my design work, and then I went and looked at the historical stuff to see what parallels I could find. And then I fed that into the stuff I was figuring out. But the key differences between then and now were, firstly, we have so much really fine-gauge knitwear in our wardrobes now, and that wasn't the focus of those wartime practices; they were imagining you were taking one hand-knitted jumper and that you wanted to make a different hand-knitted jumper. We've got very fine-gauge industrially made knits. The knitted structures are the same, but people don't see industrial fabrics in the same way. But also, what you might choose to rework is totally different in an era of overabundance than in an era of scarcity.

And so, I did all this work and showed it in an exhibition at Rugby Art Gallery and Museum: Units of Possibility: The Reknit Revolution. And on the opening day, there were various visitors. One was an elderly woman who had come in to have a look, and you could tell she was just baffled by it. She said, “We used to do this!” She probably wasn't so old that she did it in the war, but maybe in the post-war years. And she was like, “I was so glad to stop doing it!” And I remember scrambling to try and explain that I wasn't trying to rekindle some drudgery that she had to do in the past, or to nostalgically recreate it, but that I was interested in the techniques and how we might use them today. But it was a really interesting moment where the past and the present came into conversation with each other, in the form of a single elderly exhibition visitor.

annebella

It's funny, thinking about how, within lifetimes, many changes have come to pass. I had an experience last week that made me think of this when I was interviewed by a French journalist who was writing an article for a French fashion and lifestyle magazine, Spheres. He wanted to understand why charity shops are so popular in Britain and why they don’t exist in the same way in France. It was a super interesting conversation because, you know, we are only 20 miles away from France at one point on the British coast, but culturally, around the culture of clothes and charity shops, it couldn't be more different. Charity shops in the British sense also don't exist in Italy or Spain in the same way. He asked me why.

His impression, as somebody who was probably 20 years younger than me, was that charity shops became popular only in the 2010s. He also had that impression from some younger charity shoppers that he talked to just before he talked to me; they were indie kids in a band and were about 25 years old. I was able to say, “No, I can tell you from my own memory, as well as historical research, that that is definitely not the case.” They all perceived that to be the case because they had noticed charity shops for the first time around that period. They assumed that they didn’t exist before. It demonstrated to me the narrowness of extrapolating from your own experience: “I have just noticed this; therefore, it has just started to exist…”

I also had a conversation with a charity shop manager on the topic, and he was saying that one of the preconceptions that charity shop customers have, which they frequently raise in his shop, is that the prices are too high. They argue that the purpose of a charity shop is to provide cheap clothes to customers. And he always says, “No, it's not; the purpose of a charity shop is to raise the maximum amount of money for the charity.” He felt this was an annoying misconception. But my historical understanding is that, from the late 19th century, early versions of charity shops were providing a form of clothing redistribution, providing clothing for the poor. It wasn't about realising clothing’s maximum financial potential then; that’s a newer model. So, everyone was bringing their own experience of their own historical moment without seeing the bigger picture.

That was a striking bit of myopia for me. I have also noticed similar short-sightedness in teaching. I designed a module at University of Brighton called Retro, Vintage and Revival. And a lot of students on that module are keen charity shoppers, vintage clothes wearers, and sometimes dealers. And they all assume that revival culture is only as old as they are; they all assume it is a new thing. And, in fact, that assumption shaped how I structure the module. I introduce the phenomenon as something current but then I track back to show examples of historical revivalism in art and design that precede our current age. And they go right back into art and design history for centuries. It is useful for widening perspectives on contemporary practices.

amy

In a way, what I was thinking when I was making the additions to Historical Perspectives on Sustainable Fashion was the model of the BBC Radio 4 programme called The Long View. The show takes something in contemporary politics or society and the commentators look at historical comparisons—events in history that have some similarity in the way they unfolded. That was what was in my head when I was working on the book; that it was The Long View of sustainable fashion.

I certainly had that in mind when I was working on the chapter on labour practices. It really makes me put my head in my hands in despair to review how the same battles have been fought repeatedly. Progress may be made as a result of dogged work by people trying to make a difference to exploitative labour conditions for garment workers, and then the industry just moves to wherever labour is cheaper and un-unionised, and the same thing happens again. There may be a point where conditions are improving, but then the industry shifts again. That really stayed with me as an example of where, if we don’t have a sense of what has happened before, of battles that have been fought and of strategies that might have worked or not worked, then we find ourselves going over the same ground.

annebella

That’s a place where having a sense of history is depressing. It gives us a sense of futility about how little has changed.

amy

Totally. The labour battles show that especially. The same battles continue to take place in different places, in different continents. The industry moved labour from the northern states of America to the southern states where it was non-unionised. And then they move to, for example, the Far East. They just keep moving in pursuit of a place where people are in desperate enough conditions to accept the work. Garment production is relatively light in terms of machinery so the industry can keep picking up and moving on. It is terrible. So, that awareness of the bigger historical picture is a useful way of understanding ongoing disputes. But I think it is a different thing to actively take design inspiration from the past, rather than the phenomenon we have been discussing, which is an awareness that a contemporary design practice has historical precedents.

annebella

One approach is: How did we get here? Another is: How do we get back there?

amy

Yes: How do we use this stuff? Sometimes I hear fashion historians talk about historical phenomena or periods that might have something to teach us, something we could learn from, or something that we could translate. And from a fashion designer’s point of view, I feel frustrated that that is not spelled out more explicitly so we can turn those historical lessons into a kind of instruction. Sometimes, I wish that fashion historians went a little bit further in that direction—I’m imagining it as a hill that they are scaling, and that they get a certain way up to the summit. As a fashion designer, I’m scaling that hill from the other side, and I wish we could meet at the top. I’m a do-er and a problem solver, so I’m interested in making that knowledge useful. But I think some historians don’t think that is their expertise.

annebella

I think there are some projects that do that well. I’m thinking, for example, about the Politics of Patents project, which examines histories of sportswear and activewear and links that nineteenth-century moment of women’s cycling and emancipation to the historical experimental designs for bifurcated garments, for example, in the historical archive, and then remakes them. It also links them up to what we might learn about histories and expectations of women’s physical activities and participation in sports in the present day.

Sometimes, however, scholars don’t necessarily have that dual knowledge—they may not be knowledgeable about fashion history and fashion production too. Although I am not a skilled designer, I feel lucky that I spent years making my own clothes, working in fashion retail and working as a shoemaker. It brings another dimension to my historical knowledge. Of course, there have always been fashion historians who remake historic garments as a historical methodology, and there we see those dual knowledges at work. But, to generalise, remaking tends to be about what that practice can tell us about history, rather than what history can tell us about the present.

amy

There’s historical expertise coming up one side of the mountain, and there’s designers with knowledge coming up the other way and they aren’t always meeting, if you see what I mean. The designer’s expertise isn’t in history, so—if I can speak on behalf of that contingent of people—my feeling is that I don’t quite ‘know enough’. My anxiety is: What if I get it wrong? What if I romanticise? I’m cautious of cherry-picking something from the past as the basis of a collection or concept only to find historians tearing their hair out about taking something out of context. I’m really interested in how we get over that hump.

annebella

That is the challenge of interdisciplinary work, I think, and I think partnerships of experts are the key. And this is where you are doing interesting work as you are enabling those connections and conversations to happen. From the historian’s side, too, some people only feel happy talking about the area that they know, and they feel cautious about extending too much outside what they know, in case they make claims that aren’t based in demonstrable, factual evidence.

I’ve seen this myself, in fact, in relation to historical research that I’ve done on cultures of nudism in the early twentieth century. I published a summary of that work on a public facing forum—on The Conversation—in an article that was open to comments. The article started with looking at present-day social media restrictions on showing nude bodies and looking at current campaigns such as Free the Nipple, which argue for more liberal cultures of visibility for consenting bodies. I provided the histories of those campaigns among nudists, or naturists, in the mid-twentieth century, and among the photographers who fought the legal battles to show uncensored bodies in the 1950s and 1960s. But some of the commentators who engaged with the article wanted bigger picture histories than I felt equipped to provide. They asked me, for example, to provide universal philosophies of the nude from antiquity to the present, and when I hesitated, saying that I didn’t want to pontificate or make grand theories beyond the area about which I knew well—the cultures of nudism in Britain between the 1920s and the 1970s—some commentators asked why historians were like this, and why we maintained areas of expertise that were so narrow. For me, I didn’t want to be a grandstanding, arrogant sort of person, who makes big gestures and assertions that don’t stand up to scrutiny.

But it did make me reflect on the utilities and implications of our knowledge and about how far historians might take experimental risks to extrapolate from what we know. I think this can be where working in interdisciplinary creative partnerships with artists and designers can be really productive. I think historians are particularly careful to root their claims in evidence, so moving away from that into presentism, or into speculation, doesn’t always come easily, and for some, really, it isn’t what they are there to do. It is a popular expectation that what historians do is provide lessons that we can learn from in order to change lives in the present, but some historians are content to just provide the historical accounts, not to reflect on its implications for contemporary life.

amy

I do find that quite frustrating! I suppose I’m the person who wants the upshot. It reminds me of when I was doing my PhD, and I was reading quite a bit of anthropology about consumption practices in Western cultures. The anthropologists that I was reading would, for example, describe problems in the world in wonderful detail, and then stop. As a designer who is always thinking about making change, I found it incredibly frustrating, thinking: How could you get to that point and not want to go further? Intellectually, I understand the tradition, but on a visceral level I find the exquisite descriptions of terrible situations that don’t lead to any attempt to ameliorate the issues very frustrating. I recognise the problem of a designer having the misguided impression that design can solve everything, but still I had that feeling.

annebella

Perhaps that needs to be the final stage in Fashion Fictions: Now Fix Everything!

amy

[Laughs] Yes. It is interesting to hear you outline some disciplinary expectations about what historians think they should be doing, because one of the things I think about often is translation. I’m not sure if this is typical of how designers think, but it is key to me. A key part of how I like to design is translating ideas from one context to another. It's always been part of how I think.

An example of that is when I was doing my Master’s and I first discovered design for sustainability. There was, at the time, hardly anything written about fashion in that context. Most of what I found was writing about gadgets. Often the closest I could get to writing about a garment was writing about a table, for example. I thought, well, OK, at least it's an inanimate object… So, I would read a book about sustainability in relation to gadgets and I’d be wondering: What does that mean for a frock? How can I take that and apply it?

I really liked that process of translation because it was an opportunity for me to see how an idea could work and where I could take it. I remember reading a book about architecture by Jeremy Till. I read the whole thing, and I just thought ‘frock’ every time it said ‘building’, and the argument still worked. So, I really like that act of translation and that's how I feel about looking at historical examples and thinking about how we could use them for the future. It is not a restoration of something in the past, but a creative translation of the idea to the present.

Probably the way in for learning from historical examples in terms of fashion and clothes would be to think about adaptable practices. So, for example, it was once a common practice to leave big seam allowances so you can adapt a garment later; you could simply take that practice and apply it today. But the thing which I am more intrigued by is systems-level thinking. One of the examples I used in the last chapter of the Historical Perspectives book was from nineteenth-century France. A woman had an idea for a co-operative economy that was planned so you don't have too many workers or too much production in any trade, any more than it is needed. She had worked out a way of organising the trades so, for example, the hairdresser and the shoemaker would exchange their skills directly. The authorities rejected the proposal at the time—it was too radical. But I really like the idea of taking that arrangement and trying to apply it now. I actually don’t need too much historical detail to do that—it’s about working with the underlying principle.

Obviously, if there are cautionary tales to be learned about why things didn’t succeed in the past, then it is good to know them, so we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past. I don’t have the answer to this question of what we do with the stuff from the past to work with it well. But I think there's so much potential and there's something about the current positioning of the different people involved, that I feel like we're not quite making the most of it.

annebella

I find it interesting; the example that you had about translating from architecture. I have sometimes done very similar things. And I do it in part because it is inefficient for each different discipline to reinvent conceptual work when people in other areas have already done it, but just in a different domain. I think what you might be suggesting is part of that same need for efficiency and utility. If these ideas and these practices that have been rehearsed and practised and finessed and lived through in history, then making the past usable—to adapt a famous phrase from the historian Van Wyck Brooks—means doing that transposition from theory to practice and from past to present. So that's thinking about history as a resource that can be adapted rather than repeated. Out of curiosity, what lessons came out of architecture that fashion could learn from?

amy

Specifically, the book is called Architecture Depends and it was about the arrogance of architects who design images of buildings that are then ‘spoiled’ by the activities of the real people who come in with their messy and inconvenient ways. Till, who is himself an architect, was suggesting that architects should embrace the contingency of real people who live in real buildings. It made me think about catwalk shows and the way that fashion can design more for the image of garment, not its practicality; not the things you need to think about to make a garment wearable. It spoke to me about designers designing real clothes for real people, rather than images of clothes.

But I’d like to go back to that earlier idea about getting historians and designers to meet at the top of the summit; to reach over the hump to hold hands and help each other. If I position myself in the designer role of wanting to use examples from history to inspire my future-facing work, the usual way I would do that would be to go to a book and find where somebody has written wonderfully about some examples from the past. And I would find an example that I was inspired by and use it for my purpose, but of course that history was written for another purpose. And I wonder, if that historian knew how I was thinking of using it, they might have advice or insights or suggestions or warnings that could be directed towards its future interpretation and application.

If we use Kibbo Kift as an example: in your book, you write a beautiful account of all the things that happened with that group. But I imagine if I said, “I want to start a new Kibbo Kift”, then you might have aspects that you could advise on; you could highlight what feels contemporary and what parts might still be valuable in the present day.

amy

Yes. There are things I do to create some structure for the process of people coming back to this world after a flight of fantasy. I’ve tried to manage that in a sensitive way and in a way that harvests the thinking that comes out of returning to reality. I collect people’s thoughts as they come back from the speculation, to capture ideas for real-world action, real-world precedents (historical, cultural or personal), and questions about the real world that you wouldn’t have asked before. I'm building up a bank of them now called Wonder on the Fashion Fictions website. There's absolutely loads, and they could feed back into the speculations, so it becomes a formal process of working through an idea, taking it from speculative space to concrete action. Sometimes reflections are on a policy level: people may conclude that we need a four-day week; a universal basic income; a one-in / one-out clothing rule; or that we should tax virgin materials and not labour. Fashion Fictions writing allows a free, utopian thought process. When I ask people for their ideas for action, it doesn't have to be rooted in the fiction they were thinking about, but the process may inspire them to think about clothing differently. It would be lovely to have a bank of historical examples. These could be offered as starting points that Fashion Fictions participants could then translate in a speculative way, and also be reflected on for a more reformist real-world fashion policy.

annebella

Thanks, Amy, for sharing these reflections and for having this conversation. It is always inspiring to speak with you. The question we raised at the outset about what future-oriented designers can do with histories remains, of course, an open-ended provocation. But I think we’ve drawn out some points of precision around disciplinary distinctions and interdisciplinary potential, and the related limits and benefits of demonstrable evidence versus imaginative speculation. We’ve considered the care that needs to be taken in telling stories from different places and times, acknowledging where and when we come from, but we have also noted the danger of holding myopic views by extrapolating only from what we know. Although there is much more to be said and done—and hopefully these are conversations that makers and historians will continue—I think we’ve identified some workable models about how to put the past to work for present-day sustainable fashion purposes: by sharing resources, adopting long perspectives, and working in partnership as translators across disciplines.

Author Bios

Article Citation

MLA: Twigger Holroyd, Amy, and Annebella Pollen. “Long Views and Acts of Translation: Finding Usable Pasts for Sustainable Fashion.” Fashioning Sustainment, special issue of Fashion Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 2024, 1-26. 10.38055/FST030101.

APA: Twigger Holroyd, A., and Pollen, A. (2024). Long Views and Acts of Translation: Finding Usable Pasts for Sustainable Fashion. Fashioning Sustainment, special issue of Fashion Studies, 3(1), 1-26. 10.38055/FST030101.

Chicago: Twigger Holroyd, Amy, and Annebella Pollen. “Long Views and Acts of Translation: Finding Usable Pasts for Sustainable Fashion.” Fashioning Sustainment, special issue of Fashion Studies 3, no. 1 (2024): 1-26. 10.38055/FST030101.