Emma Kidd

Emma Kidd trained in Contour Fashion Design at De Montfort University (BA Hons) and worked in Southeast Asia as a designer and product developer for a wide variety of international brands. After witnessing the negative social & environmental impacts of profit-oriented, large-scale manufacturing and the take-make-waste approach of commercial design practice, Emma left her career as a designer and began to study and explore holistic alternatives.

After completing the MSc Holistic Science at Schumacher College in 2009, Emma focused her passion for wholeness & holistic thinking in her work as a writer (First Steps to Seeing, 2015), phenomenological researcher, lecturer, and holistic “sustainability” activist and practitioner.

She specializes in the practice of understanding life through lived experience (applied phenomenology) and the process of using a holistic approach to understand better the nature of nature, the nature of humans (phenomenology of perception), and the nature of human interactions & systems.

During her PhD research on Personal Sustainability Transitions in Clothing Consumption at Glasgow Caledonian University, Emma founded the public behavior change intervention—the Fashion Detox Challenge. This project aimed at reducing overconsumption featured in The New York Times, BBC, and El Mercurio (Chile).  Members of the public were invited to stop buying new clothing for ten weeks and to reflect on the experience via a private online forum called the Detox Diary. More than three hundred people subscribed to the challenge worldwide and in 2021 the United Nations selected the Fashion Detox Challenge as a “Best Practice” for the Sustainable Development Goals.