This Enactment was adapted from the
It was a drop-in version, using just the first three steps of the recipe.
This Enactment, which involved dressing up in the style of World 54‘s resourceful yet opulent fashion culture, was part of Try It Out, Try It On, a one-day drop-in workshop in Nottingham in April 2023.
Other activities offered at the workshop included documenting the story of a garment for future generations (World 27); exploring an interactive game based on clothing poetry (World 62); and dreaming up new fictional fashion worlds.
The fiction guiding this Enactment:
In World 54, production of new textiles has stopped and people dress resourcefully using bedsheets and other random items.
They use sheets of cloth combined with cardigans for warmth, secured using ingeniously versatile straps and button arrangements. Assorted objects, often not originally intended as adornments for the body, are used as a form of oversized jewellery.
Dressing in this culture requires time, effort and creativity. Trends typically focus on the way in which fabric is draped, the arrangement of fastenings and the careful selection of colour and decoration.
The buttoned sheets, ingenious straps, cardigans, adornments and instruction cards created for the original World 54, Enactment i (see Recipe for full details) were distributed around the space, along with a mirror, a screen showing the World 54, Enactment i film, some brief written guidance and some helpful facilitators.
People explored the affordances of the World 54 resources and had lots of fun!
The printed instructions (follow the link for an editable version to download and reuse) read:
Adapt this Enactment
Would you like to adapt this Enactment for your setting? Please feel free to use the ideas shared here – and tell us how it went! Send an email to Amy with your news.
This Enactment was devised by Amy Twigger Holroyd, adapted from an earlier Enactment also by Amy Twigger Holroyd, which built on an Exploration created by Johnny O’Flynn, Gillian Allsopp, Kate Harper and a Fashion Fictions contributor, which was in turn developed from a World contributed by Wendy Ward, 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: Adam Shaw.
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.
Please share any such examples using this form. Thank you!