For much of modern cultural history, textile occupied an uncertain position.
It could be functional, decorative, domestic or artisanal, yet it often remained outside the central narratives of contemporary art and design.
That distinction is changing.
In Paris, textile is increasingly visible across museums, foundations, galleries, fashion and collectible design — not simply as cloth or craft, but as a material language capable of carrying memory, structure, identity, labour and place.
For Traces of the World, this shift is significant.
Our time in Paris, including our participation in IC Curate, offered another perspective on this movement. Beyond presenting our own work, it allowed us to observe how textile is increasingly crossing the boundaries between fashion, art, craft and design — and how material, process and provenance are becoming part of a wider contemporary conversation.
What is changing is not necessarily the textile itself.
It is the way we are learning to look at it.
From Material to Language
A woven surface contains extraordinary complexity.
Fibre becomes thread.
Thread crosses thread.
Tension creates structure.
Repeated movements gradually become form.
These qualities have always existed within textiles.
But removed from a purely functional context, they become visible in another way.
Scale matters.
Weight matters.
Texture, movement, shadow and irregularity become part of how the work is experienced.
Textile begins to occupy space rather than simply cover it.
Artists such as Olga de Amaral, Sheila Hicks and Magdalena Abakanowicz were fundamental to this transformation. Their work demonstrated that weaving, knotting and fibre could move beyond conventional definitions of tapestry and become languages of abstraction, sculpture and spatial experience.
They did not need to abandon textile knowledge to become contemporary.
They expanded what that knowledge could become.
Material Returns
Perhaps the renewed attention to textile is also connected to a larger cultural shift.
We are beginning to question materials again.
Where do they come from?
Who transforms them?
What knowledge exists behind their making?
What relationships have been made invisible by industrial production?
Textile makes these questions tangible because every cloth contains a sequence.
A material has an origin.
A thread contains process.
A woven structure contains time.
And behind each of these stages are people, tools and accumulated knowledge.
The closer we look at a textile, the less anonymous it becomes.
From Territory to City
This creates an interesting movement within our own research.
In Chiapas, Kutch and the Himalayan regions, we often follow textile backwards — from cloth towards technique, fibre, people and territory.
Paris represents another direction.
Here, materials and techniques originating in very different contexts enter exhibitions, galleries, fashion, design and cultural institutions.
They acquire new audiences and new interpretations.
The movement from territory to contemporary culture creates possibility, but it also creates responsibility.
When a textile leaves the context from which its knowledge emerged, what travels with it?
What remains visible?
What disappears?
Who is acknowledged?
And how can contemporary design engage with inherited material knowledge without reducing it to aesthetic reference?
These questions increasingly form part of the way we understand our own work.
Another Idea of Value
The contemporary interest in textile also suggests a changing understanding of value.
For decades, industrial production taught us to associate quality with uniformity and perfection.
Yet many of the textiles we encounter through our research reveal another kind of value.
A handspun thread may vary.
A woven surface may contain irregularities.
Natural fibres respond differently from one batch to another.
The hand remains visible.
Rather than defects to be removed, these variations can become evidence of process.
They reveal that material has travelled through living systems and human hands.
Perhaps this is one reason textile feels particularly relevant now.
It brings material back into view.
A Changing Gaze
What we encountered in Paris was therefore part of something larger than a renewed interest in textile aesthetics.
It reflected a changing gaze.
A willingness to look more closely at material.
To recognise the intelligence contained within techniques historically positioned at the margins.
To reconsider the separation between making and thinking.
And to understand that contemporary expression does not necessarily require abandoning what came before.
For Traces of the World, this conversation connects directly with the questions that have accompanied our research from the beginning.
How can living knowledge move forward?
How can material retain something of its origin?
How can ancestral techniques participate in contemporary culture without becoming frozen in the past?
There may be no single answer.
But textile itself offers a possibility.
It can travel.
It can transform.
It can take another form.
And still carry traces of where it began.
The material has not changed.
Our way of seeing it has.