book workshop #1 @ Fashion x Craft Project 2023
It was a joy to go back to Berlin and do one of my favourite jobs of the year.
The Fashion X Craft Project, an initiative from the German Fashion Council and the Prince’s Foundation, gives a cohort of young sustainable fashion designers a year of learning experiences. They get exposed to crafts of all different types and stripes outside their usual frame of reference, exploring disciplines like woodwork and ceramics while receiving business mentorship for their fashion work.
I get to do the book bit.
This year due to a tighter turnaround I selected six shorter texts in the form of essays, speeches and a short documentary which I paired thematically and gave to the designers who took them on in pairs.
The texts were:
Nadia Asparouhova - The Tyranny of Ideas / Steve McQueen - What’s There Left To Say About Kanye West? / Zadie Smith - Fail Better / Robert Moor - The Beautiful, Brutal World of Bonsai / Leila Slimani - Call For Crime / North of the Sun
They then presented the texts to the group, sharing a moodboard inspired by what they’d read and then we discussed the resulting themes together.
This is the second year of these workshops and it’s really fun. We do one in Berlin and one in the UK at Highgrove House and I’m delighted that last year’s designers asked if I could come back! But aside from being fun, there are several benefits to doing workshops like these:
inspiration
critical thinking
presenting ideas
creating trust in a group
The final point is the one that struck me. When discussing the savage mentorship of the bonsai piece, everyone began to share their own stories of learning experiences both good and bad. By the end, the group knew a bit more about each other, about how they like to learn and communicate and that they could be vulnerable in front of each other.
One of my favourite responses to the texts was the word ‘Ambivalence’, the idea you’re allowed to have contradictory feelings about things and they probably indicate a nuanced opinion rather than a lack of conviction. The designers then highlighted a series of dichotomies they found in their texts and displayed them visually.
There’s loads of possibilities with this sort of workshop and I’m looking forward to our followup at Highgrove in the summer.
Thanks to the German Fashion Council and the Prince's Foundation for creating and supporting the Fashion X Craft Project and I'm really excited about continuing this relationship and the books workshop series.
If you’d like to do something similar, just get in touch.