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Amy Twigger Holroyd

Amy Twigger Holroyd

Professor

Nottingham School of Art & Design

Staff Group(s)
Fashion, knitwear and textile design

Role

Dr Amy Twigger Holroyd is Professor of Alternative Fashion Systems at Nottingham School of Art & Design. Through design-led participatory research, she explores plural possibilities for post-growth fashion systems: alternative ways of living with our clothes that meet our fundamental human needs and respect ecological limits. Her current projects are Fashion Fictions and Organizing Differently.

Amy coordinates the Sustainable Transitions group in the Fashion & Textile Research Centre, as well as climate action work across the School.

Career overview

After studying BA and MA in fashion and textile design, Amy ran her experimental knitwear label, Keep & Share, for ten years. She sold her knitwear nationally and internationally and received awards including the Crafts Council Development Award. Her work was featured in many publications, from Vogue to Fashion Theory.

Amy studied for a PhD at Birmingham City University. Entitled Folk Fashion: Amateur Re-knitting as a Strategy for Sustainability, this research used a participatory workshop-based methodology to generate new insights about experiences of making, remaking and fashion. The research formed the basis of Amy’s first book, Folk Fashion: Understanding Homemade Clothes (I.B. Tauris, 2017) and the Reknit Revolution initiative and exhibition.

Following her PhD, Amy was a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, working on an AHRC-funded project that explored how design can contribute to the revitalisation of culturally significant designs, products and practices. A co-edited book, Design Roots: Culturally Significant Designs, Products, and Practices, was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2018.

Soon after joining Nottingham Trent University in 2016 Amy co-edited a second book, Fashion Knitwear Design, with her colleague Helen Hill. The chapters were written by the team of specialists who deliver Nottingham Trent University’s highly respected fashion knitwear design courses.

Amy has been an investigator on three AHRC grants since 2019. Two were funded research networks: Stitching Together aimed to foster critical dialogue around participatory textile making in research and practice, while Crafting the Commons interrogated connections between craft practices and ideas of the commons and informed the development of touring exhibition We Are Commoners. In 2021 Amy was awarded a AHRC Research, Development and Engagement Fellowship for her Fashion Fictions project (further details below).

During the development of the Fashion Fictions project, Amy co-authored another book, Historical Perspectives on Sustainable Fashion: Inspiration for Change (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023) with Jennifer Farley Gordon and Colleen Hill. This project enabled her to focus on the use of historical precedents to inform future sustainability transitions.

Amy was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Visual & Performing Arts in 2024.

In her inaugural professorial lecture from March 2026, 'One Song to the Tune of Another: Alternative Possibilities for Fashion and Sustainability', Amy reflects on more than two decades of work in the field of fashion and sustainability.

Research areas

Through design-led participatory research, Amy explores plural possibilities for post-growth fashion systems: alternative ways of living with our clothes that meet our fundamental human needs and respect ecological limits.

Amy currently pursues three strands of inquiry, all relating to participatory speculation for sustainable change in the fashion system and other sectors:

  • how to design effective participatory speculation experiences
  • what kind of speculative visions are generated
  • how participatory speculation can impact thinking and behaviour.

Fashion Fictions

Since 2020 Amy has explored these questions via her Fashion Fictions project, which brings people together to imagine, explore and enact alternative fashion worlds as an unconventional route to real-world change. Fashion Fictions has been funded by an AHRC Fellowship (2021–23) and NTU’s Impact Accelerator Fund; the project has involved more than 6000 participants via over 150 activities in universities, schools and communities worldwide.

The research is generating valuable insights into people's desires for sustainable fashion systems. These insights are revealed via common themes that can be identified across diverse visions, from nature connection and ritual to organisation and rebellion. A book exploring these themes, Fashion Fictions: Imagining Sustainable Worlds, was published in 2025.

The research is also illuminating the value of collective imagination activities for sustainable transitions. Real-world impacts include the generation of a vibrant and varied repository of creative ideas and artefacts; new thinking about the real-world fashion system and an expanded sense of possibility and agency; and intended and actual changes in individual and collective clothes-related behaviour.

Organizing Differently

Amy's current research, funded by the Philip Leverhulme Prize, builds on her previous work in participatory speculation and alternative fashion systems to explore how the production, exchange, use and recovery of clothes and other forms of material culture might be organized differently.

The project, Organizing Differently, aims to support the flourishing of post-growth systems for fashion and other areas of material culture by speculating on alternative possibilities for organizing. These speculations, generated via participatory workshops, will draw on existing organizational formats but also push beyond them, using a design orientation to devise propositional arrangements of people, resources and material flows that could thrive in a post-growth economy. In doing so, organizing is presented as a space for play and experimentation and capitalism is understood as just one among many possible systems.

Through this practice-based research Amy is investigating interconnections between designing and organizing. She is interested not only in how organization can be designed differently and how design can be organized differently, but also in resonances between these two widespread processes.

Supervision

Amy has supervised five PhDs to completion:

  • Sally Cooke, ‘Material Encounters: fashion sustainability examined through beginners’ experiences of learning to sew clothes at home’
  • Iryna Kucher (Designskolen Kolding), ‘Designing Engagements with Mending: An exploration of amateur clothing repair practices in Western and post-Soviet contexts’
  • Emily Rickard, ‘KnitWell: Exploring creative, open-ended knitting as a form of journaling to record emotions, with consideration for mental wellbeing’
  • Elsa Ball, 'Negotiating fashionable identity through hair and the salon: implications for sustainability and fashion'
  • Beth Pagett, 'Natural dyeing in contemporary craft cultures: intra-actions between humans, nature and materials'

She currently supervises four PhDs:

  • Megha Chauhan, ‘Intercultural Frameworks to Re-Search Textile and Nature Partnerships: Rhythms and Rituals of Wool from Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat’
  • Selene States (Bauhaus University Weimar), 'A Suite of Changes: A Political Timeline of the "Pantsuit" 1919–1946'
  • Gemma Metheringham, ‘Co-creating Desirable Secondhand Fashion Futures’
  • Natalie Cole, ‘Starting with Soil: Investigating Compostable Materials from Local Food and Agricultural Waste for Sustainable Furniture and Products’

External activity

  • Member of AHRC Peer Review College (2019–)
  • Regular peer reviewer for publishers including Bloomsbury Academic, MIT Press, Routledge and Springer and journals including Craft Research, Fashion Practice, Fashion Theory and Journal of Textile Design, Research and Practice
  • Reviewer for academic appointments and promotions at institutions including RMIT, University of Borås, Designskolen Kolding and Parsons
  • External examiner, PhD examinations at institutions including UTS, RMIT, University of Gothenburg, Lancaster University, University of Leeds, Northumbria University and University of Brighton (2019–)
  • External examiner, MA Fashion Futures, London College of Fashion (2018–2023) / MA Textiles & MA Surface Pattern, University of Wales Trinity St David (2017–2021)

Publications

Books

Twigger Holroyd, A. (2025). Fashion Fictions: Imagining Sustainable Worlds. London: Bloomsbury.

Twigger Holroyd, A., Gordon, J. F. & Hill, C. (2023). Historical Perspectives on Sustainable Fashion: Inspiration for Change (second edition). London: Bloomsbury.

Twigger Holroyd, A. & Hill, H. (eds) (2019). Fashion Knitwear Design. Marlborough: Crowood Press.

Walker, S., Evans, M., Cassidy, T., Jung, J. & Twigger Holroyd, A. (eds) (2018). Design Roots: Culturally Significant Designs, Products, and Practices. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Twigger Holroyd, A. (2017). Folk Fashion: Understanding Homemade Clothes. London: I.B.Tauris.

Selected journal articles

Twigger Holroyd, A. & Pollen, A. (2024). Long views and acts of translation: finding usable pasts for sustainable fashion. Fashion Studies 3(1).

Aspinall, M. & Twigger Holroyd, A. (2024). Fashion fictions: student experiences of designing sustainable fashion worlds. International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education.

Shercliff, E. & Twigger Holroyd, A. (2020). Stitching Together: Ethical dimensions and innovative approaches to participatory textile making (Introduction to guest-edited Stitching Together Special Issue: Part 2). Journal of Arts & Communities 11(1-2), pp.3–11.

Shercliff, E. & Twigger Holroyd, A. (2020). Stitching Together: Participatory textile making as an emerging methodological approach to research (Introduction to guest-edited Stitching Together Special Issue: Part 1). Journal of Arts & Communities 10(1-2), pp.5–18.

Twigger Holroyd, A. (2018).  Reknit revolution: knitwear design for the domestic circular economy. Journal of Textile Design Research & Practice 6(1), pp.89–111.

Twigger Holroyd, A., Cassidy, T., Evans, M. & Walker, S. (2017). Wrestling with tradition: revitalising the Orkney chair and other culturally significant crafts. Design & Culture 9(3), pp.283–99.

Twigger Holroyd, A. (2017). From stitch to society: a multi-level and participatory approach to design research. Design Issues 33(3), pp.11-24.

Selected book chapters

Twigger Holroyd, A. (2024). Finding solidarity in Fashion Fictions. In: D. Bruggeman (ed.), Practising Solidarity: Critical Fashion and Agency that Matters. Arnhem: ArtEZ Press.

Twigger Holroyd, A. (2023). Fashion Fictions. In: L. Gardner and D. Mohajer va Pesaran (eds), Radical Fashion Exercises: A Workbook of Modes and Methods. Amsterdam: Valiz.

Twigger Holroyd, A. (2024). Writing sustainable fashion worlds. In: A. Schramme & N. Verboven (eds), Sustainability and the Fashion Industry: Can Fashion Save the World? Abingdon: Routledge.

Twigger Holroyd, A. (2018). Digital transformations, amateur making, and the revitalization of traditional textile crafts. In: S. Walker, M. Evans, T. Cassidy, J. Jung & A. Twigger Holroyd (eds) Design Roots: Culturally Significant Designs, Products, and Practices. London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp.291-303.

See all of Amy Twigger Holroyd's publications...

Press expertise

  • fashion and sustainability
  • post-growth fashion
  • speculation and fashion
  • design and sustainability
  • amateur making (mending, knitting, sewing)
  • homemade clothes