Textile Studies

Textile Studies is the study and research of textiles ranging from common everyday jeans to historical textile treasures. Textiles and clothing are fundamental constituent parts of our material culture. Textile Studies subjects them to scholarly study across a range of fields of social activity. These include cultural history (everyday culture, one’s own culture and foreign cultures), the history of fashion and costumery, the history of production, technology and society, and the history of consumption, design, ecology and decoration.

Textile Studies aims to study the social significance of textiles and to deliver the educational methodology to teach children about them at school. Textile Studies focuses on the content of people’s material world and their way of life, thereby giving the field a high level of potential connectivity with other fields in subjects as diverse as intercultural education, image and fashion, health education, gender equality, globalisation or education for equal opportunities. 

The course curriculum is based on a scholarly and creative concept which is rooted in people’s everyday culture and lifeworlds and which examines people’s creative interaction with material culture. It uses textiles to teach fine motor skills that are under threat in an increasingly virtual world.

The particular appeal of the curriculum in the Bachelor phase is its interplay between individuals’ everyday experiences with textiles and clothing on the one hand, and scholarly study coupled with practical and aesthetic design on the other. This raises interesting questions about the interplay between production and consumption, economics, design and ecology.