A conversation with Amy Twigger Holroyd

Over the past five years, I have thought a lot about what I wear. I used to buy garments a few times a month, a mixture of fast fashion and secondhand. In 2018 I quit cold turkey. 

It has been an interesting journey; at first, I didn't need anything; I told myself I could make do with what I had. Then as time passed, I missed the creativity, the thrill of the discovery, the novelty – taking a turn in something new, to me. I started buying a few pieces of secondhand clothing, and then last year, I knitted my first jumper. It took three months, made from a powder pink yarn. 

The first couple of times I wore it was exciting; I loved it and felt incredibly proud. However, over time it lost its luster; it entered my wardrobe – joining the pile of other jumpers – and became just another piece of clothing. 

When I interviewed Amy Twigger Holroyd, the designer, maker, writer, and researcher, for this month's newsletter, she pointed out that knitting something from scratch mirrors the industrial production system; you buy the yarn, get the pattern and make something new. Instead, she asks, What if you were to reknit something? In her project Reknit Revolution, she takes you through all the ways you can rework a knitted item.

Twigger Holroyd's work over the past twenty years has been around questioning how we think about clothing in the Western world. We are so used to it being designed for us; we are not involved in the cut, construction, color, or embellishments. In response she has worked on projects that get people more involved in the process. 

However she also aims to explore and dispel the romanticism around handmade clothing. In her book Folk Fashion: Understanding Homemade Clothes, she interrogates the idea that we will be emotionally attached to an item we make for ourselves. Concluding that we can't design in an emotional attachment. This challenges the notion that we might cut consumption and production by encouraging a more significant relationship between clothing and wearer. After all most of us have something in our wardrobe that was mass produced from cheap fabric that we wear repeatedly, and other things, like my jumper, that were made with lots of love, that are seldom worn. 

Shonagh Marshall: I want to start by asking you, what was your approach to fashion or clothing as a young person?

Amy Twigger Holroyd: I remember my nana teaching me to knit when I was five, which was a bit small, really, but my big sister was learning, so I joined in as well. I have a strong memory of sitting on her knee with her hands on top of my hands, moving them to form the stitches. My nana was a prolific knitter, and my mum sewed, certainly not all our clothes, but she made a lot of clothes for us. 

I was drawn to the idea of making stuff, particularly using textiles, so my mum would help me with sewing projects using her sewing machine. I must have been sufficiently annoying because she bought me a secondhand, hand-powered Singer sewing machine for my 13th birthday. That was probably the best present I've ever had. I've still got it. 

I would buy charity shop clothes and make stuff in my teenage years. It was all bound up together as a fun thing to do that was challenging – nicely hard. Trying to make things that you want to wear is always tricky. It was a big part of my childhood and bled into studying fashion.

Shonagh: You went to study for a BA in fashion, and during the course, you did an internship. It was there that you decided you didn't want to be part of the scale of destruction and waste of the fashion industry. What triggered that thinking? A lot of people weren't thinking about that at the time.

Amy: Yes, this was 2000 or 2001. The internship was a kind of rag trade knitwear supplier to the High Street and catalogs; Littlewoods was the biggest customer of this company. There was some production in the UK, but mainly in Asia, specifically Hong Kong. 

We would use a CAD system to design the knitwear. Then samples would be made in Hong Kong. There's always a to and fro where the samples would go back and forth and be developed. One day I was designing a sequined cat on the front of a sweater. It was so horrible. The sweater was made in cashmilon, the name for acrylic yarn that is meant to have a handle of cashmere, with the cheapness, and oiliness, of acrylic – what a combination!

I was virtually moving these circles to represent sequins onto the outline of a cat on this CAD system and found it tedious. There was something in imagining the person who would have to stitch on the sequins to make the sample, someone I would never meet. I felt that what I was doing was pointless. It wasn’t a nice design; it came from some weird request from a buyer who had seen a version, ripped something off, and combined it with something else. The whole thing was devoid of any design value, in my opinion. And if it went into production, there would be a few 1000 of these sequined cats. 

It just all seemed pointless – a waste of effort, creativity, resources, and connection between people in different parts of the world. I continued with my placement, and I learned a huge amount about knitwear while I was doing it. But it seemed awful on every level, being part of an industry that sold that sweater as a meaningful and worthwhile thing to do. It didn't sit right with me.

Shonagh: After your degree, you went on to study a master's where you were looking for other people with similar ideas who were questioning the industry. You discovered demi, an online resource developed by Kate Fletcher and Emma Dewberry. What was demi? 

Amy: Demi was created by Kate and Emma when they were at Goldsmiths, University of London. It was a design for sustainability resource; it was not specifically about fashion. I found a research paper a while ago that explained how they developed it. The resource was aimed at higher education to introduce design concepts for sustainability to students. I found it myself; it wasn't introduced to me by my educational experiences. It had several principles – I don't remember how many – the ones I can remember were: the principles of efficiency, sufficiency, and equity. 

The difference between efficiency and sufficiency captured my imagination. Efficiency is doing the same thing, producing the same stuff, but less bad – basically, most sustainable fashion. It claims we can still make the things, we can still churn them out and pile them up high – but we've lessened the impact in some way. There's often an overlap between environmental benefits and benefits for the business; let's say you managed to reduce your energy consumption, then your energy bill goes down – brilliant. That kind of thing is not difficult for anyone to get on board with; it seems great.

Sufficiency, in contrast, is about satisfying the same needs through less stuff rather than more. It is much more radical. It encourages you to ask, What are needs? How could I be trained to satisfy these needs? It shifts the emphasis from the stuff you're producing to think about your work's aim. That captured my imagination, and I was interested in studying how to explore sufficiency as a designer. 

Efficiency seemed too easy; it seemed too obvious. How could you satisfy people's needs – connected to fashion and clothing – with less material stuff? That led to the concept for Keep & Share, my knitwear label; I did the first collection for my MA project. The keeping is about longevity, keeping something in use for longer – more goodness out of one item. And the sharing is the idea of versatility. Either one person is wearing something in different ways, or a piece shared between people or passed on over time. You can get more satisfaction of need out of one unit of stuff.

Keep & Share, SS 2008, Image by Meg Kerr

Shonagh: You ran Keep & Share for ten years, from 2004 until 2014. Could you tell me more about how it worked and what you discovered during that time?

Amy: It started with this idea of getting more out of each item. I was designing pieces that could have a long life and be worn differently or handed down. I quickly recognized that giving something a long life isn't just about material durability. It's also about emotional factors; you need to have the desire to keep wearing something over time. I was also developing my own craft techniques for making knitwear – particularly for joining pieces seamlessly during the knitting process. 

I would sometimes sell to boutiques but mainly sold to individual customers. That personal connection, challenging the idea of the designer on a pedestal, was important. I was trying to have a genuine connection with people. I felt like there were lots of elements that would contribute to something potentially staying in use for a long time, and I was trying to embed as many of those elements in there as I could. 

The pieces were unconventional designs. I was always trying to combine archetypal elements with unconventional construction. Because I was making things on a craft scale, I would use seamless techniques that you could not do in a factory. The designs were dependent on manual techniques and had a sense of familiarity, they didn't fit in with a particular trend, but they also weren't classic and boring. I was trying to combine these elements to support the conditions for the clothes to be kept in use. 

Design students often say, ‘I will design something long-lasting by making an emotional connection between the person and their garment.’ But I increasingly realized over time that what happens to the garment once it leaves you as the maker or the designer is entirely out of your control. It's a very seductive idea for designers, and I think I was seduced by it, the idea that you can design in a long life and emotional connections – that the wearer will automatically know and enact what you have in mind. All kinds of unpredictable things can happen. Some of the longest-lasting pieces in my wardrobe are mass-produced and unremarkable. And I've got some very beautifully crafted things which I don't wear or use. Over time, I've increasingly recognized that you need to have humility as a designer and that you can't design to predict the thing's life. I guess it's a note of caution. 

Shonagh: While you had Keep & Share, you began a Ph.D. This was an interesting moment because you moved from instilling an emotional investment in the wearer to giving them autonomy. Can you tell me about this transition and specifically about stitch hacking and reknitting? 

Amy: Yeah. As part of Keep & Share, I used to run hand and machine knitting workshops. I decided to start teaching beginners; I did one where you could come and knit your own cardigan on the weekend. It was my signature style of cardigan, and by complete fluke, it lent itself to taking someone who had never used a knitting machine through the process. Everyone came out with a cardigan at the end. 

Going back to the emotional connection, in their experience, they had a nice weekend in the countryside, and they amazed themselves by making this cardigan from start to finish. I think that would have been setting up some pretty good conditions for wanting to keep wearing something. 

The other strand was that I was getting frustrated that my primary way of interacting with people was selling them something. Okay, I was trying to do my label differently and set an example of a different kind of business. But at the same time, I was making stuff to sell to people. My conversations with people were about this commercial transaction. For the first few years, I enjoyed the challenge of designing things that I could make and sell at a profit. When you're making stuff to sell, you're thinking about how long it takes you to make. I enjoyed working within those parameters. But after a while, it felt restrictive that what I could make was limited by what I could charge for it. It felt very dominated by commercial considerations. 

I had been doing more conceptual or participatory projects, sometimes with kids or community projects. I started looking for projects that could be the slowest and least productive and not about making something to sell. 

One day when I was knitting a cardigan for somebody, I got the idea about stitch hacking. It's hard to describe in words without a piece of knitting in front of you. It's reconfiguring the stitches of an existing piece of knitting into a new structure that wasn't there before. You're not adding anything or taking anything away; you're just reconfiguring the loops of the piece of knitting into a new design. It uses what's generally a repair technique. If you put a ladder in some tights, you reform the stitches up that ladder. Or you would do it in a piece of knitting because you've made a mistake. But you can use the same technique to make a change proactively. 

I had this idea about this technique and started messing around with it. I then began creating pieces that were conceptual explorations of the idea of the technique, rather than making something to sell – it's massively slow and time-consuming. Because it was really about me exploring ideas and not making things to sell, I was trying the technique on finer and finer gauge pieces of knitting, so the stitches became smaller and smaller and smaller. The resolution was getting finer and finer, like in a digital image. The most complicated one was a St. Michael cardigan from a charity shop. St. Michael is the Marks & Spencer brand of the 80s and 90s. I hacked in the whole St. Michael logo and the text from the labels inside the garment. It was this slow meditation of working with these tiny stitches and the joy of being able to mess with the fabric and put something in there that wasn't there before. So, yes. That’s the stitch hacking technique. 

When I was putting my Ph.D. proposal together, I broadened it out from stitch hacking, which is a particular process you can do with an existing piece of knitwear, into asking: what happens if I tried to think about all of the possible things that you could do to rework a piece of knitwear? What happens if you apply the knowledge you have as a designer, maker, or knitter to an existing piece of knitwear rather than always making something new? That was one shift: from creating new things to reworking existing things. 

The other was from me being a designer and maker, to, as you say, trying to encourage other people to do the making. Or, in the case of reknitting, it is about trying to reposition existing skills. Hand knitters have amazing talents. But the cultural understanding of what knitting is is that it is generally making things from scratch. You get some yarn, you get the pattern, you make the thing, you're either happy with it or not. Then you move on to the next thing. I was broadly trying to encourage people to see knitting more as a process that could be applied to the reworking of existing items, as much as to making new items.

This process is how it would have been in the past; you don't have much yarn or much time. It's a lot of effort to make an item of clothing; you wouldn't replace a whole jumper just because the cuffs were ragged; you would replace the cuffs. It's just in our current period, with the gross abundance of stuff, that those things have kind of fallen out of favor. Our contemporary idea of what knitting is – making something from scratch – mirrors industrial production, or linear industrial production, a little bit too comfortably for my liking. 

Image by Amy Twigger Holroyd

Shonagh: That challenges how we think about knitting. I have been knitting a jumper, and I did everything you mentioned – got the yarn, got the pattern, made a new item. It mirrors the fashion system, it is just a slower production process, and of course, you have made it for yourself. During your Ph.D., you created the Reknit Revolution website, where you share ideas about reframing knitting to be more than just making new things. This is an open-source platform, and you have also done a project about fashion commons. Why is working within a commons framework vital to you?

Amy: It came from having conversations with people at the workshops I was running. There were many people with really great making skills, but then they'd feel unsure and ask: Shall I put this color with this color? Sometimes there was uncertainty about what they made because it didn't look like something bought from a shop. I can sympathize with that feeling of wanting it to look like something shop-bought. I understand the frustration, anything that I ever say about wearers I can identify with. But it just seems like such a shame; is the best we can aspire to, that it looks like something from the shops, something put up for commercial exchange? I don't want to feel like I'm being mean to anybody, but to me, it just shows how much of a consumerist mindset we have and how wedded to industrial production we are. We have internalized it.

I got riled up about this, and I went to the university library and got a book about commoners, as in people who had common rights before the enclosure of land in England in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. I went to stay with my mum and dad and remember holding the book and saying, this is what I need to explain what I need to do to fashion.

I can't remember what led me to connect this, but it built on my high school history lessons, where we learned about the enclosure movement. I was thinking of the massive injustice of the taking of resources by the rich from the poor for the benefit of the rich. It was not only taking away resources but then forcing people into a situation where they're dependent on wage labor. The emergence of the capitalist system of the industrial revolution was a time of massive upheaval and centuries-long implications.

So, I translated that idea to fashion to come up with the idea of the fashion commons, which I see as representing all of fashion, now and in the past, material and immaterial. I see the industrialisation and professionalisation of fashion as having enclosed the fashion commons. It means that only certain areas of the commons are approved – things you're allowed to do. What you're really allowed to do is go and buy stuff. You can buy the things that shops have decided are available for you at the moment. Yes, you can shop secondhand or make stuff yourself, but you're wandering off the path and into socially risky territory because the normal, right, or socially sanctioned thing to do is to be a good consumer and go and buy things.

The commons belongs to everybody, and everyone should have an equal right to do stuff. But with enclosure, people are forced into particular places, roles, and ways of doing things.

The reason why it feels like a productive metaphor is that you can look at the history of people fighting for the right to land or fighting against the enclosure of land as a kind of inspiration. You might think about the Kinder mass trespass, people fighting for the freedom to roam, or going back further, the Diggers and other movements claiming that land is a human right. These examples could awaken something inspiring; we typically don't think about fashion in this way because the consumerist model is so dominant. We are also always fighting against the view that, Oh, it's just clothes. It's just fashion. It's not very important. Completely erroneous but a very prevalent viewpoint.

Installation, Keep & Share Knitting Tent that visited festivals around the UK each summer from 2009 to 2014. Image by Amy Twigger Holroyd and Cybèle de Jong

Shonagh: You wrote a book following your Ph.D. called Folk Fashion: Understanding Homemade Clothes. There were some myths you explored about homemade clothing in the book; could you explain what you found?

Amy: Stories tumble out of people when you start knitting; it is a conduit for stories. So I had a lot of stuff to draw on.

It is a cautionary tale. I had noticed a habit in the design sustainability movement, where people talked about homemade things and DIY things in a romanticized way. It's a bit like the emotional durability I mentioned. It's a seductive idea: someone making something for themselves that they're emotionally connected to, so they'll keep it for a long time. This is a great thing to happen, and it does in many cases, but it's not universally the case. I had this feeling that people, and I have to say it was usually men, who were saying, It's great for people to make their own clothes, had never tried to make an item of clothing for themselves, put it on and wear it out of the house. I had a feeling that people with this view had never gone through that emotional journey of hope and the disappointment that followed.

I wanted to research to give an empirically grounded counter to the romanticization of the homemade. I want to encourage people to make things, but the romanticization of anything is always something to be wary of. It's simplistic; it's saying: This is great, full stop. That's worrying because if somebody doesn't have that experience, they're going to be doubly hard on themselves. If the narrative is, I made something and I love it, I am such a success. Then you feel like a failure if you don't think that.

There is also a culture in knitting or fashion making, more broadly, where quick and easy projects are celebrated. For me, making isn't quick and easy. It's slow and difficult. That's where the satisfaction is.

I wanted to push back against those tendencies to think that homemade is universally great and it's easy and quick. My Ph.D. research was working with a group of knitters who were reknitting items from their wardrobes. Reknitting is more complicated than following the pattern because you have to do a lot of designing and decision making. It is a different activity. But in addition to knitters for the book, I interviewed home sewers and talked to people about their experiences of making things. I found, of course, people have mixed experiences. Just as there are great, inspiring examples of people making things and being pleased with them, there are also many experiences of things not turning out very well. Or of things turning out objectively fine, but people inevitably comparing them to shop-bought items because we live in a culture where buying stuff from shops is the norm.

At the end of the book, I tried to encourage people to counter this. Validation feels the most powerful way to do this; people boost each other and encourage each other, and validate the choices they're making in making something for themselves. That does happen loads in areas of maker culture, but there is still a lot of capacity for things to go wrong, and I don't want that to be overlooked.

Shonagh: More recently, you've been working on a project called Fashion Fictions. The idea came from you reflecting on your work and the state of fashion sustainability more broadly. You've been working for 20 years in this space, and the situation is worsening. Is that what galvanized you to start it?

Amy: Yeah, I saw a lot of time passing, and not that much changing in initiatives in the industry. The profile of sustainability issues in fashion has increased, and more people are aware of it. But the conversation doesn't seem to have gone very far. We're still focused on material choices and incremental changes. We are not addressing the bigger question of the economic system that all this stuff is happening within.

More specifically, I started my current role at Nottingham Trent University, and I was supervising the dissertations of fashion, textile design, and knitwear design students. Often I would have students who were writing something to do with sustainability. They would spend three chapters talking about things to do with mending with the best of intentions. But then their conclusion would be, it would be good if a few more people did some mending. I would find myself dancing around saying, You're at art school, for heaven's sake, think big, think radical. The number of things they thought were not worth mentioning in the current system because they will never change – the capitalist system, people buying loads of things. I found it frustrating.

So I started asking: What can I do to be helpful? I felt like it was an opportunity to try and open up a space to imagine alternatives. To openly think, what kind of a fashion system would we like? Let's not worry about how we would get there for a moment or how outlandish it is. At least imagine that something else is possible; that would be a starting point. Then other possibilities will show themselves. I wanted to see where the conversation would take us. I've seen people starting from the same place for 20 years, and it hasn't got us very far. Maybe we needed to imagine ourselves in a different place and see what happens then.

Fashion Fictions World 19 prototype in progress. Image by Sanket Haribhau Nikam

Shonagh: You do set some parameters for this imagining; could you explain what they are?

Amy: The first is that Fashion Fictions is a kind of speculative design, like speculative fiction. It invites people to imagine alternative worlds instead of projecting into the future. It's about encouraging people to imagine a parallel world where it's also the year 2021. It is a world parallel to our own that is split off from our planet at some point in history. So, rather than saying, What will the fashion system be like in 10, 30, or 50 years? 

There are many reasons for this that I haven't wholly pulled apart in my head. But one is if we're projecting to the future, then we still have that problem of thinking from where we are now. The other is that if we project into the future, it's easy not to challenge a kind of Promethean technological progress narrative: AI will sort it all out, or robots will make everything. I don't think this narrative is that relevant to clothing, bearing in mind that we're still wearing clothing made from pieces of knitted or woven fabric that have been put together by people using their hands in some way. It's been pretty much the same for hundreds and hundreds of years; I don't think it's going to change anytime soon. We need to change the social and cultural norms, not technology. So I wanted to remove that techno-optimism.

The second one is that we try to imagine positive and enticing alternatives rather than dystopian ones. Lots of speculative stuff goes down the dystopian route, and I think it's dystopian enough as it is in the real world. I understand the argument for dystopian fiction; it shows you how things could be, and it will make you think deeply about how things are progressing in life, but it's just not my thing. Thinking of somewhere where we want to be works better for me. 

The third one is more of an encouragement than a rule. I try to encourage people to focus their fictions on the use of clothing rather than the production of clothing. In the sustainable fashion field, particularly in research terms, because we tie it in with industry and business and research that is linked to design, we tend to think about designing and making things. Even if we're thinking quite radically about how we design and make things differently, we're still coming up with proposals for how to put new things into the world. So I try to encourage people to think about the everyday wearer's experience. It might include how things are made and produced, but it's about the experience of use rather than design and production. 

I also say that you can't just rely on a time machine or a magic wand – you can't just resort to magic. There are some lovely poetic fictions that are pushing the rules a bit. There's one where garments start to talk back to their owners and tell them their stories, which I really like. However, this rule is so people don't use a magic wand so clothes can just be printed out of the computer, or something. It has to be physically possible. But the fictions should push beyond what seems plausible; it should go beyond what you can imagine happening down the road or reading about in a magazine. If someone were writing a fiction based on people swapping clothes, I would say there are loads of great things going on where people exchange clothes, but it's not the dominant normal thing that happens with most clothes most of the time. So if somebody were writing a fiction on that basis, I would encourage them to amplify the practice, so it becomes the absolute core of the fashion system in that fictional world. I want them to push the boundaries of plausibility.

Shonagh: Thank you so much, Amy! I've got so much from this conversation. My last question is, what's your utopia? What's your Fashion Fiction?

Amy: It's very appropriate, but it's also hard to answer. 

There are 149 utopias on the website at the moment, a chunk of which I've written. I hope this doesn't seem like a cop-out answer, but my utopia would be a world of many utopias. It's the Zapatista’s pluriverse, a world in which many worlds fit. Going back to the early days of my experience thinking about fashion and sustainability, I have always said that there can't be one solution. There can't be one vision of sustainable fashion; there has to be a constellation of things going on that will suit different communities, groups, cultures, subcultures, ages, tastes and preferences, and abilities. All of the different varieties make people wonderfully varied. There need to be so many different solutions, or utopias, that sit in those different places and interconnect in a complex way. 

That comes through in the work I've been doing with Fashion Fictions. It's kind of a game, and when I write them, you come up with one neat idea that's kind of the core of your world. But it can’t actually describe a whole world and many of the fictions could coexist and interact.

I think that kind of complexity and locally situated solutions that are interconnected feel inherently more sustainable and more healthy than a monoculture. There are already pockets of great things going on in fashion, hidden away from the mainstream media. So my utopia would be so many more of those pockets, to the point that the complexity becomes the norm.