About the HERITEX-HUB project
The HERITEX-HUB project aims to create a networked knowledge hub to empower the green transition in textiles and fashion by harnessing the wealth of data, knowledge, and insights provided by the study of Textile Heritage. It brings together Textile Heritage researchers to create practical tools and guidelines, and to explore ways to provide training, mentoring, and collaboration opportunities to craftspeople, creators, innovators, entrepreneurs, start-ups, and small and medium businesses in the textile and fashion sectors.
Research on Textile Heritage has developed into a full-fledged transdisciplinary field which has amassed a wealth of data and insights about natural resources, their development and uses, and the environmentally adaptive strategies deployed to exploit them in the past. It also affords critical glimpses into different ways of making, wearing, and transforming textiles and clothing, which point the way towards alternative, more sustainable consumption practices.
This significant potential remains, however, underexplored. Textile Heritage research faces serious challenges to convey the significance of the knowledge it produces and to convey it in actionable forms capable of informing evidence-based decisions. This has hindered the pursuit of meaningful and transformative synergies with the creative and business sectors. There is, therefore, a clear need for a new platform capable of fostering such approaches and unlocking the potential of Textile Heritage research to contribute to contemporary society.
That is the role of the proposed HERITEX-HUB knowledge hub, which will empower stakeholders to pursue sustainable creative and business practices and value chains and act as a partner and institutional support in transformative projects. The end goal is to promote a bottom-up transformation of the textile and fashion industries, positively contributing to rebuilding it along fair, sustainable, and socially responsible lines.