We would like to thank all those who were involved in the schools pilot project, including our delivery partners Ignite and Bulwell Arts Festival, the teachers and pupils at the six participating primary schools and the creative practitioners who supported the schools with their activities.
- 1 Sally Cooke and Amy Twigger Holroyd, Fashion Fictions for Children: Resource Pack for teachers and (...)
1This article presents outcomes from the “Fashion Fictions for Children” schools pilot project, which invited children to explore speculative possibilities for sustainable fashion systems. The project involved researchers from Nottingham Trent University working with teachers and children (aged 8-11) from six local primary schools, supported by professional creative practitioners and two local partner organisations. A resource pack, developed as an outcome of the pilot,1 is now being used by teachers and facilitators to deliver further activities in formal and informal education settings.
2In this article we introduce Fashion Fictions and the thinking behind the schools pilot project; present a selection of project outcomes; discuss the project’s impacts; and finally, identify the potential of Fashion Fictions for Children as an ongoing participatory project.
3Fashion Fictions is an international participatory speculation project that aims to support transitions towards sustainable fashion systems by reshaping understandings of the possibilities for sustainable fashion. First established in 2020, the project brings people together to generate, experience and reflect on engaging fictional visions of alternative fashion cultures and systems as an unconventional route to real-world change. Fashion Fictions is open to anyone to participate or run their own activities. Prior to the schools pilot, the majority of the 4000+ participants who had taken part had been adults, predominantly in higher education settings.
4Fashion Fictions uses the concept of “parallel presents” as a catalyst for the open and playful imagination of alternative ways of living with our clothes. The parallel present is an alternative version of the present day in which important aspects of life are radically different. Participants are invited to create positive and enticing alternatives, and advised that their visions should be physically possible but extend far beyond what feels plausible —to them—today. The project has three stages, each inviting a different type of speculative activity. Stage one involves writing short outlines of fictional worlds; Stage two invites the development of visual or material prototypes of artefacts from those worlds; and Stage three offers a deeper level of embodied engagement through the enactment of a skill, practice or event in the fictional world.
5Through these activities, participants reveal what they would wish for in a transformed fashion system. The imagining of fictional worlds allows for undesirable environmental impacts or cultural norms to be turned on their head, undervalued skills and niche practices to be given higher status, and cliched fashion tropes to be supplanted by more meaningful alternatives. Those who engage in Fashion Fictions activities often report an expanded sense of hope and possibility regarding change in the real world, as well as changes in their personal dress practices.
- 2 Bill Lucas, “A Five-Dimensional Model of Creativity and its Assessment in Schools”, Applied Measure (...)
- 3 Rabab Saleh and Alexander Brem, “Creativity for sustainability: an integrative literature review”, (...)
- 4 Gerhard de Haan, “The development of ESD-related competencies in supportive institutional framework (...)
- 5 Verity Jones and Tessa Podpadec, “Young people, climate change and fast fashion futures”, Environme (...)
6In the schools pilot project, we adapted the established Fashion Fictions methodology for use with children, drawing on our experiences with the wider project to embed creativity within education for sustainability. Creativity has been identified as an essential skill for the twenty-first century2 and something frequently lacking in sustainability education.3 The anticipatory competency (being able to see beyond the present to understand the future as open and something that people can help to shape), which is recognised as crucial for sustainability transitions, involves creativity and imagination.4 Furthermore, participatory and action-based methodologies, which often involve hands-on creative activities, have been identified as helpful in enabling educators to address topics such as fast fashion without provoking climate anxiety.5
7Our hope, then, was to use the creative collective speculation activities of Fashion Fictions to influence children’s thinking about sustainability issues during a formative period in their lives. We developed a series of experiential learning activities for the project that, with the expert support of our collaborators, could be tested with the children we were working with. The activities were designed to introduce fashion and textile sustainability issues in an age-appropriate way, engage the children in a playful exploration of different responses to these issues, and prompt them to consider connections and possibilities for influencing the world around them.
8The design of the pilot project activities reflected the three stages of activity outlined above, bookended with scene-setting and reflective activities. In Phase one, the children were introduced to bite-size facts regarding the social and environmental impacts of fashion and textiles and supported to discuss this information as a group. A series of “what if?” prompts—based on ideas generated by adult participants, rewritten in accessible language—were then shared and the children were encouraged to write and/or draw their own fictional world in response. We used some of the most engaging Phase one outcomes to produce a series of short outlines that were exchanged between the schools.
9In Phase two, teachers were encouraged to engage their class in a deliberative process to identify which fictional worlds the group would prefer to live in. Each school was then paired with a creative practitioner who supported the children to explore their chosen world through creative making activities. In Phase three, the artefacts that the children had made were exhibited as part of a local arts festival and the children came together (in two sessions, each involving three schools) to share their work.
10The remainder of this article focuses on the Phase two making activities of three of the six schools and the outcomes and impacts of those activities as reported by the children (through an end-of-project survey) and by the teachers and creative practitioners (via feedback meetings and surveys during and following the project).
11Schools A and C both explored worlds in which people decorate their clothes with things that are important to them. In School A, the children envisioned people stitching their ideas, emotions, strengths and interests into their clothes and imagined that the ability to decorate clothes in this way would be seen as a superpower. In School C, the children explored a world in which people decorate each other’s clothes with signatures and images reflecting memories and things that are special or important to them. In both schools these explorations resulted in collaborative pieces that brought the contributions of all the children together. To make these pieces each group had been introduced to a variety of textile craft skills, including hand and machine sewing, appliqué, embroidery and fabric painting.
Figure 1: Exploring a world in which clothes express people’s strengths and interests: appliquéd and embroidered panels attached to a waistcoat and rucksack created by children from School A
Figure 2: Exploring a world in which clothes are decorated with signatures and memories: a collaborative class cloak created by children from School C
12In School B, the children chose to explore a world in which clothes could change colour in response to the wearer’s emotions. The description of this fictional world included a “drying tree” on which people would hang their clothes. The group used a range of decorative embellishment and customisation techniques to create garments reflecting different emotions and then displayed their garments on a specially decorated tree in the grounds of the school.
Figure 3: Exploring a world in which clothes change to show people’s emotions—upcycled and embellished T-shirts created by children from School B
- 6 B. Lucas, “A Five-Dimensional Model”, op. cit.
13In developing the pilot project we aimed to design activities that would foster creative habits of learning, such as imagination and inquisitiveness,6 and give the children agency in determining the direction their collective project would take. Importantly, around 70% of the children reported in the end-of-project survey that they had enjoyed their participation in each part of the project; exploring ideas through drawing and making activities received the most positive responses (81% and 77% respectively). Learning to sew was most frequently identified as the most enjoyed activity by children in School A (55%) and C (50%), as expressed here by a child from School A: “It was really fun to do and everyone tried it and liked it. I learned to sew.”
14The majority of children from School B (55%) identified making their T-shirts as the activity they liked most. These children emphasised the opportunity to express themselves, be creative and use their own ideas and imagination as reasons for this preference. One child from School B articulated the value of this experience extending beyond the project: “I liked exploring my ideas through making because it gave me some amazing ideas not just for the project but for other things too.”
15The teachers and creative practitioners involved in the pilot all remarked on the degree of enthusiasm the children had shown for the project and the thought that the children had put into their co-created and collaborative pieces. The creative practitioner who worked with School B commented:
The children blew me away on this project. I came up with a practical way they could explore their world and they flew... each child could talk you through their piece of clothing from concept, editing, rethinking and its impact.
16A teacher from School C also commented on the careful consideration the children had given to their individual contributions to the collaborative cloak and their ability to explain what they had done and why. The teacher in School A suggested that:
The children understood the ideas more than we did!! They have free imaginations and those that are creative thinkers really took to it. I noticed some great group work and sharing of ideas.
17These responses suggest an enthusiasm for visual and tactile textile making activities amongst the children that extended beyond the adults’ expectations of them. This mismatch perhaps reflects the power of the speculative proposition in the project’s design to open up the children’s latent potential for creative thinking and action in the textile space.
18The intention of the Fashion Fictions project as a whole is to influence people’s thinking and behaviours related to clothing in terms of social and environmental sustainability. When asked about the most interesting thing they had learnt about clothes during the project, the children’s survey responses reflected the issues of waste, pollution and environmental impact that had been introduced in the first session. Key areas of interest included the fact that clothes are made from different materials and the development of alternative materials, such as fruit fibres, for the future. The children also reported that they had gained an understanding of how clothes are made and learned about the possibility of combining and adapting clothes to suit themselves. The creative practitioner from School A shared her reflections:
Children were surprised at how easy it was to create garments from paper. And were surprised by how fast it was to sew using a sewing machine. There were a few lightbulb moments from children that making and changing their own items was a possibility.
19By the end of the pilot project, the children were able to articulate many ways in which clothing could be used more sustainably, particularly through making, mending, repurposing and handing on clothes that no longer fitted them. The skills they had learnt in the context of exploring their fictional worlds were already having an impact in their everyday lives. As the Teacher from School A commented:
Children are talking about mending clothes, sewing badges on their own Beaver jumpers and some children have started to swap unwanted clothes with each other. They see the need to recycle.
20Thus, it appears that the speculative activities, which had framed the learning of creative textile skills, had given the children new perspectives on their own clothes and some capacity to act in response to their nascent social and environmental awareness.
21The Fashion Fictions schools pilot project raised awareness of social and environmental sustainability issues related to fashion and clothing in ways that were enjoyable and potentially formative for the children involved. Although we did not explicitly ask the children to comment on their feelings throughout the project, the feedback they gave at the end, combined with the insights of their teachers, suggest that the project had succeeded in introducing these sustainability issues in a way that fostered a sense of agency more than it induced eco-anxiety. The fictional worlds that framed the project activities created a space for learning textile making skills that might not otherwise have been given the same time or attention in school. The children embraced the learning of new textile skills in this context and in some cases had already incorporated these skills into their everyday lives and their thinking about their own clothes.
22The findings from the schools pilot project show that the guided use of speculation and embodied practice can yield meaningful shifts in thinking and action amongst children, just as in adults. We encourage other teachers and facilitators to use the Fashion Fictions for Children resource pack to design and run their own creative speculative fashion and textile activities, and look forward to seeing how this work continues to unfold.
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