Book Club No.7: In Conversation with Professor Kate Fletcher | Fletcher's Almanac Vol. 2

Yeah.

So I this is the second volume of this almanac.

So it had a volume that came out two years ago.

And so this is a new iteration with new stories and it sort of keeps the same rough format in that it moves through the years, moves through the seasons.

But one of the things that I felt was really important to do was to recognise the the profound impact that climate change is having on our experience of seasonality, of the weather.

And so the split between the seasons is really distorted with a very short winter and extremely long spring and autumn, and then a very hot, intense summer in the centre of it.

And I guess that this was also a way to challenge us to think differently about these questions on many levels.

But the format itself is one that I found really interesting.

So I heard Dame Marina Warner speak about almanacs.

And she talked about almanacs in terms of them being some of the first mass media that were ever produced.

And traditionally, they were containing lots of information about...

Local agricultural practices, when to plant, when to harvest.

And also it was a real mix of things like horoscopes and predictions for the future.

It was full of bawdy humour often.

But what she did is she described an almanac as always a portrait image.

of a community.

So it wasn't necessarily just about what to plant when, although that is very helpful.

It's actually something in a way, a bigger invitation than that.

It's a bigger invitation for us all to paint a portrait of the community in which we live, in which we dress, in which we move in the dressed body through and within and are part of.

And so I guess in this, I mean, these are really febrile times, climate change, ecological emergency.

And if we bring it down to basics, it seems to me that a shift in perceptual consciousness is pretty much the thing that we need to engage with in order to make a difference.

I've been working in the field of fashion and sustainability for decades.

more than 30 years.

I mean, a long old time.

And, you know, in that time, we have worked harder and harder to try to improve the sector, to reduce impacts, to sort of find ways to tinker and instrumentalize and find ways, mechanistic ways into shifting things.