Events

Exhibition Towards a European Textile DNA

Prato Textile Museum, 30 March - 30 May 2007

Exhibition

The aim of the Twintex Museums project is to develop synergies and collaborations between textile museums in ACTE member cities in such a way as to develop their urban economies and play a key role in enhancing their heritage of local knowledge regarding the textile sector. The project thus focuses on the connections between local textile industries and local know-how, with a view to improving integration between museums and their districts of reference and thus between culture and industry.

The specific aim of the Towards a European Textile DNA exhibition is to enhance the heritage of seven European textile cities:

  • Lodz - Central Museum of Textiles - Poland
  • Prato - Museo del Tessuto - Italy
  • Roubaix - Musée d’Art et d’Industrie - France
  • Sabadell - Museo de Historia - Spain
  • Schio - Comune di Schio - Italy
  • Terrassa - Centre de documentaciò i Museu Tèxtil - Spain
  • Verviers - Centre Touristique de la Laine et de la Mode - Belgium
Campionario

The industrialization of the textile sector in these cities has had an extremely strong impact on the social, economic and urban development of the various areas of reference. Together with the industrial architecture in which the local textile factories were housed, the articles produced in these cities are among the few tangible examples of this transformation and thus extremely valuable bases upon which to develop a European textile culture. Indeed, it is only recently that the value of industrially manufactured articles has been fully acknowledged from a historic and creative point of view, although it has now been realized that the transformation of patterns and materials belonging to national and local traditions is one of the best ways of exploiting their creative potential.

The wealth of knowledge housed within the textile heritage is clearly manifest in the sample books displayed in this exhibition. Dating back over three centuries – from the end of the 18th century to the middle of the 20th century – these books clearly illustrate the traditions and developments of the textile industry in the various ACTE member territories. The sample books also enables us to reconstruct the way in which tastes changed and fashions developed, as well as the way in which technical transformations changed production over the decades. In this sense, the use of museum textile collections in training and generating creativity is fundamental to furthering the development of the sector. Indeed ancient textiles provide an inexhaustible source of inspiration for design and planning.

The work of identifying and networking the various centres involved in the Twintex project has signified merely the start of the project’s search for a common denominator - the DNA of the European textile sector – a factor which binds the century-old knowledge and creativity of textile production in Europe.

The exhibition also includes a number of videos providing archive footage of industrial architecture, images of social conditions in textile factories and images of the museum collections of the territories involved.