Welcome to World 27, where people tell the stories of their garments instead of giving them a price-tag.
In this world, post-pandemic consumption and lifestyle shifts have made us value the textile histories of our clothes – the greater the number of associated histories, the greater a garment’s desirability.
The fictions, or Worlds, are framed as parallel presents guided by loose parameters with sustainable fashion at their core
Garments are traded and gifted within the framework of performative activities such as mending circles, where storytelling plays a significant role. A new, unscarred, non-storied garment is of little appeal; lived-in, mended, altered garments are in highest demand.
In August 2022, a group took to the woods to enact a World 27 ritual garment exchange. This film shares the afternoon’s discoveries.
This is one of the concepts created as part of the creative research project Fashion Fictions run by Dr. Amy Twigger Holroyd, Associate Professor of Fashion and Sustainability at Nottingham Trent University.
So how does this world-building work? The fictions, or Worlds, are framed as parallel presents guided by loose parameters with sustainable fashion at their core. The project evolves around sustainable cultures and systems, practices of use (rather than production and conventional consumption) and exploration of social and cultural factors, rather than technological change.
World 27 ritual garment exchange, part of Fashion Fictions.
Participants in Fashion Fictions include people with experience of fashion cultures gained through wearing and enjoying clothes (yes, that could mean you!), along with those with specialist expertise in fashion theory and history and design and fashion and textile practice.
At Atlas we’ve been diving into these worlds, and you can already read about our time with the mushrooms or the resourceful yet opulent fashion culture of World 54.
For World 27 Atlas commissioned filmmaker Jim Boxall from Studio Softbox to document and interpret the workshop run by Amy, where participants immersed themselves in this fiction and told the stories of their garments.
Their challenge was to bring clothes that had meaning for them to a ritual exchange. Find out how this workshop altered their thoughts about fashion in this spiritual woodlands.
The challenge was to bring clothes that had meaning for them to a ritual exchange.
This Enactment was devised by Amy Twigger Holroyd, building on an Exploration created by Sally Cooke, Charlotte Tupper and a Fashion Fictions contributor, which was in turn developed from a World contributed by Jeannine Diego, using a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence which allows others to share and adapt the work in any medium and for any purpose, providing that they credit the authors and share their material using the same Creative Commons licence.
