Design Contest Top 10 & winners

Over  a 100 talented (young) designers participated in this years ‘Design Contest 2017 | Reinventing Textiles’, in which the participants designed a special product or material. The jury, Simone Post, Martijn van Strien and Suzan Rüsseler, selected the Top 10 that can be seen from November 26 to December 10, 2017 on the Panoramadeck of the TextielMuseum.

The top 10:

Wille-Meike Brand (1st prize)

Wille-Meike Brand won the first prize for the use of a printing technique with old polyester garments and a heat press.

Due to low prices and the fast-changing trend-cycle garments are discarded very easlily. Polyester textile is a material that is mainly used in the cheap fashion industry. From experiment with the abundance of this waste material Meike found a printing technique. With the use of a heatpress the “soul” of a garment can be transferred onto another absorbing surface, such as textile but also paper, without dying, which is one of the most polluting parts of production of textile objects.

Veerle Kluijfhout (2nd prize)

The second prize went to Veerle Kluijfhout, who makes sweaters from cat hair with a critical note.

As a designer Veerle is interested in the way in which we relate to the products in our consumer society. Why do some materials have value, and others don’t? By knitting sweaters of cat hair makes us aware of this question in a playful manner, because, what actually is the difference between cashmere, angora or hair of an ordinary domestic cat?

Loan Favan (3rd prize and Public prize)

Loan Favan won both the third prize and the public award for her research into techniques to make textile materials suitable for human consumption in a dystopian future.

In her work Loan presents us a laboratory situated in a dystopian future. In her lab she experiments with techniques of making textile materials suitable for human consumption, while asking herself the question: What is the future of human kinds eternal desire for production, what happens if the earth is saturated with goods?

Alicja Konkel

Alicja Konkel predicts all materials in the near future will be re-used. With her design for biodegradable shoes, based on the aboriginals whose shoes were used up in exactly one journey, she wants to raise awareness among consumers about nature and about themselves.

Bram de Vos

In his utopian idea Bram sees vertical farming as the future for our agriculture, an d by that also as base voor the production of textile materials. In his vision, the building of TextielMuseum Tilburg can be covered with greenhouses in which hemp can be produced. This could be a start for an eco-friendly way of producing textiles.

Cox Janssens

Textile is often seen as a disposable product. This is due to their quality, but also because of the behavior of the consumer: people are bored more and more quickly by their clothing and lose the skills to treat them well. In her ‘Time Included Cloth’ project, Cox Janssens tempts users to extend the life of the fabrics, because beautiful changes take place during normal use. Time and wear are now embraced: aging processes created by washing, friction and sunlight increase the value and beauty of these textile designs.

Dorian Koelmans

On a yearly basis tons of fire hoses are thrown out. Designed to be indestructible their disposal is very harmful for the environment. However, written off by the fire brigade does not make them useless as building material in fashion or interior. For Dorian, this was his starting point in the design process of this product. He wanted not only to apply the technical superior quality of the fire hose in the function of the product, but also to use the charm of the bright colours in which they are produced.

Guy Megides

In her project Guy uses textile waste as raw material for a new building material. She wonders why clothes, which production takes a lot of time, are thrown away this easily instead of re-using them. By gluing and pressing together layers of textile a new sort of board material emerges. With her work she presents a solution, and hopes to inspire industries to look at waste in a different way.

Marion Lim en Laura Conill

Marion and Laura want to give people the opportunity of recycling at home. A lot of raw materials have already been used for 3D-printing, however, the use of textile waste as a base material is innovative and gives people a playful and practical manner of processing their old clothes instead of throwing them away.

Tom van Deijnen

In his project Tom shows a restoration can be an addition to the looks of a textile product. By making the repair stand out he reinforces it’s user history and makes it even more valuable for the owner.