Seen the World 91 Enactment i report or story and want to try it out for yourself?
Great! Follow this guide to have a go.
You’ll be enacting a fictional fashion world in which mushrooms are hailed as spiritual guides. You’re invited to present yourself to the mushrooms, once a week, for six weeks.
You can do this Enactment individually, as part of an in-person group, or as part of a geographically distributed group connecting via email or group chat.
The fiction guiding your Enactment:
Once a week in World 91, people undertake a quiet ritual: they present themselves to the mushrooms that are widely understood as spiritual guides.
For most, this practice involves a fleeting visit to a wooded area to enable a few minutes’ connection with either visible fungi or the hidden mycelial network, and reflection on cycles of decay and regeneration.
As a sign of respect in this nature-centric culture, people take great care over what they wear for the mushroom visits. Aesthetics vary, some adopt celebratory flamboyant styles, while others opt for a more subtle approach.
The mushrooms see it all.
What you need
You don’t need much for this Enactment!
- Don’t buy any garments especially – work with what you already have in your wardrobe.
- You don’t need any specialist mushroom knowledge, but if you’re keen to learn, you could borrow a mushroom identification book from your local library.
- If you are working with a geographically dispersed group, you might want to set up a group chat.
Choose which day of the week you’re going to present yourself to the mushrooms. If you’re enacting the World with others, try to pick a day that suits you all.
For your first visit, decide what to wear to present yourself to the mushrooms. Don’t buy anything new – use what’s already in your wardrobe. What do you think the mushrooms want to see? There are no right or wrong answers!
Locate some mushrooms. You might need to hunt a little: wild areas with fallen trees are a good place to look. If you struggle to find any visible mushrooms, find a wild place where you can think about hidden mycelial networks.
Present yourself to the mushrooms! It’s up to you whether your visit is brief or lingering, and what ‘presenting yourself’ will involve. You might want to reflect on cycles of decay and regeneration. Again – there are no right or wrong answers!
If you wish, record your experiences in some way. If you are part of a geographically dispersed group, you could share an update with the others via a comment and photograph posted to the group chat.
You might want to record your experiences as yourself in the real world, or ‘in character’, i.e. as a fictional World 91 version of yourself. When writing in your World 91 voice, add MW (Mushroom World) to your comment. For example: ‘MW: I went to visit the mushrooms that my granny used to dress for when she was a girl’.
Repeat the previous steps every week for six weeks. Your approach to dressing and presenting yourself might evolve over the weeks, or it might stay the same.
After you have completed your six-week taster of World 91, take some time to reflect. You might like to use the Fashion Fictions wonder-capture activity.
Tell us about your Enactment
Have you had a go at enacting World 91? We’d love to hear how it went! Send an email to Amy with your news.
Related Enactment reports
This Enactment was devised by Amy Twigger Holroyd, building on an Exploration created by Elly Platt, Talia Hussain and Martin Benes, which was in turn developed from a World contributed by Suzanne Rowland, 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.
Image credits: many thanks to Julie Ripley, Roshni Bhattacharya, Annebella Pollen, Kate Harper, Jade Lord, Talia Hussain and Sanket Haribhau Nikam.
Does this World remind you of something?
I am keen to hear about any historical or contemporary real-world examples – whether individual practices, subcultures or mainstream activities – that this fiction brings to mind.
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