Folk Fashion: Understanding Homemade Clothes

Amy Twigger Holroyd is a designer, maker, writer and researcher. Through her knitwear label, Keep & Share, she has been exploring the emerging field of fashion and sustainability since 2004. Her work has been sold and exhibited worldwide and featured in many books and publications, from Vogue to Fashion Theory. She is a Senior Lecturer in Design, Culture & Context at Nottingham Trent University.

A dynamic resurgence in sewing and knitting is under way, with many people enjoying making and mending their own garments at home. However, stories abound of homemade clothes languishing at the back of the wardrobe. Amy Twigger Holroyd draws on ideas of fashion, culture and craft to explore makers' lived experiences of creating and wearing homemade clothes in a society dominated by shop-bought garments. Using the innovative metaphor of fashion as common land, Folk Fashion investigates the complex relationship between making, well-being and sustainability. Twigger Holroyd combines her own experience as a designer and knitter with first-hand accounts from folk fashion makers to explore this fascinating, yet under-examined, area of contemporary fashion culture.Looking to the future, she also considers how sewers and knitters might maximise the radical potential of their activities.

Thinking radically about making & wearing homemade clothes

Cast List
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1 Introducing folk fashion
Chapter 2 The resurgence of folk fashion
Chapter 3 Identity, connection and the fashion commons
Chapter 4 Why DIY? The experience of making and wearing homemade
Chapter 5 Reknitting: an experimental folk fashion practice
Chapter 6 Patterns, design and creativity
Chapter 7 Making the wardrobe
Chapter 8 Folk fashion and the future
Bibliography
Index