This Enactment was adapted from the
It used only step 4, where a garment story is documented.
This World 27 Enactment, which invited participants to document the story of a garment for future generations, 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 dressing up in the style of a resourceful yet opulent fashion culture (World 54); exploring an interactive game based on clothing poetry (World 62); and dreaming up new fictional fashion worlds.
The fiction guiding this Enactment:
In World 27, textile histories are central to the way garments are valued: the greater the number of associated stories, the greater an item’s desirability.
Wearers are therefore motivated to keep items in circulation, rather than hoarding them, and ritual events throughout the year provide opportunities for storytelling and swapping. In the East Midlands of England, a notable exchange takes place each season.
At the event, wearers document the latest instalment of their garment’s story and display it on a washing line, along with the piece itself; others then bid to be the item’s next custodian.
We provided assorted types of paper, crayons, felt tips, pens and pencils, a washing line with pegs for people to display their stories, some brief written guidance and a few helpful facilitators.
Lots of beautiful visual and written stories were created and pegged up, creating a lovely display!
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 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.
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