Abstract
“Fashion Fictions” is a speculative design project that responds to the unsustainability of the mainstream globalised fashion system by inviting people to imagine, explore and enact alternative fashion worlds as an unconventional route to real-world change. The project is participatory and open to anyone to get involved or to run their own activities. Since the project’s inception in 2020, the Fashion Fictions methodology has been used by facilitators around the world, working primarily with adults in a variety of higher education and community settings. This paper shares learning from a schools pilot project that tested the methodology and adapted the project’s resources for use with children. The pilot project involved academics from Nottingham Trent University in the UK, working with local partners and over 230 children from six local primary schools. During the project, children were introduced to basic information about fashion and textile sustainability issues, engaged in group discussion and supported in a series of creative speculative activities—from imagining fictional worlds to co-creating material prototypes and enacting skills and practices from those worlds. The children embraced the learning of new textile skills in this context. By the end of the project, the children were able to articulate many ways in which clothing could be used more sustainably and in some cases had already incorporated the skills and insights they had picked up into their everyday lives. The pilot project demonstrated the power of the speculative proposition in the project’s design to open up the children’s latent potential for creative thinking and action in the textile space. A Fashion Fictions for Children resource pack, developed as an outcome of the pilot, is now available for teachers and facilitators to deliver activities in formal and informal education settings.