Professor Amy Twigger Holroyd’s Inaugural Lecture

Overview

In this inaugural lecture, Professor Amy Twigger Holroyd will reflect on more than two decades of work in the field of fashion and sustainability. She will identify recurring patterns in her approach to design practice and research: refusing to accept the status quo, dwelling in the speculative, and borrowing ideas from unfamiliar spheres. The lecture will explore stories of these creative translations, drawing on her PhD research that framed fashion as common land; her Fashion Fictions project, which initially took inspiration from fantasy fiction and subsequently drew on literatures relating to topics as diverse as performance, spirituality and solidarity; and current research initiatives that forge alliances between design and organisation and look to history for lessons to inform the emergence of alternative fashion systems.

Biography

Amy is Professor of Alternative Fashion Systems and joined NTU in 2016 following ten years running her experimental knitwear label, a PhD at Birmingham City University and postdoctoral research at the University of Leeds. She has published five books, including two monographs, Folk Fashion: Understanding Homemade Clothes (I.B. Tauris, 2017) and Fashion Fictions: Imagining Sustainable Worlds (Bloomsbury, 2025); a co-authored book, Historical Perspectives on Sustainable Fashion: Inspiration for Change (Bloomsbury, 2023); and two co-edited volumes, Design Roots: Culturally Significant Designs, Products, and Practices (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Fashion Knitwear Design (Crowood Press, 2019). Amy has completed an AHRC Research, Development and Engagement Fellowship (2021–23) and led two AHRC-funded research networks, Stitching Together and Crafting the Commons. Her Fashion Fictions participatory speculation project has engaged more than 6000 people spanning six continents. She was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Visual & Performing Arts in 2024.

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