Through its history and its ubiquitous presence in everyday life, textiles embrace symbolic and functional, cultural and decorative dimensions in uses which are both personal and collective. A flexible material, textiles are moveable, made of fibres and threads, wefts and stitching; they nurture complicity with the line, the text and digital processes. They are the bearers of countless expressions of ancestral know-how and a prospective terrain for research, the catalyst for a vast industrial sector. The search for textures and structures, rhythms, drawings and colourations is the very subject of the work of the textile designer, which they implement as a means of autonomous expression or towards established applications.

The studio’s programme enables students to understand the issues of textiles within a wide vista and through them to make coherent choices in accordance with their aspirations. The transversal nature of textiles leads students to imagine it deployed across art, fashion and design and invited into hitherto unseen terrains. The demanding character of interactivity with different fields of application takes the form of individual or collective working partnerships.

The students develop a personal language by fundamentally questioning the medium, as much in terms of its sensory, functional and cultural resonances as through its technical processes. This implies the acquisition of tools of analysis, creation and production through the varied professional backgrounds of the studio’s teachers, and thanks to the assistants who bring to creation the general courses and optional arts-course tutorials. The experimental processes develop through learning the techniques of weaving, stitching and printing. Successive interpretations of the work enable its multiple issues to become more apparent, its special features to be honed, and its status to be formulated. Working partnerships with external bodies or other studios within the school, training courses and enrolling the studio in international networks aim to stimulate the creative processes, to kindle exchanges and encounters, to refine the developments of the project. In addition to the general compulsory training course available to the different studios organized at La Cambre, the bachelor’s aims to provide the student with an understanding of the whole of the textile industry, of its multiple sources and issues. Over the course of the three years, the students develop experimental protocols and respond to given topics by questioning the different levels, statuses and applications of textiles. The demanding nature of a technical polyvalence permits an opening to various specializations.

The master’s entails an engagement on the part of the student in a domain of creation, based on an awareness of what they are undertaking and accomplishing in the professional, artistic and social world. The programme helps the student to choose a personal project, developed over two years and whose implementation transcends the scope of the school. The students have access, in optional form, to different courses and multidisciplinary studios at La Cambre or in other establishments, in such a way to adapt the programme to the demands of the subject chosen. Internships and residences in various contexts at an international level are encouraged during the master’s.

Pedagogical coordination
Linda Topic, textile designer
Anne Masson, textile designer