Our Fashion X Craft participant Tatjana Haupt was honored as the 2023 Wilhelm Lorch Foundation award winner. Every year, the foundation honors projects and talented young professionals in the textile and fashion industry in the categories of creation, business, technology and further training in retail. The funding is intended to support the award winners in their training and further education. The 27-year-old says: "I feel very honored to be supported by the Wilhelm Lorch Foundation and to be connected to the German textile industry again after my studies abroad." We are proud that Tatjana's talent is now appreciated elsewhere, as we have been for several months at Fashion Council Germany. Tatjana's work is strongly influenced by her home near the Swiss border. After graduating from high school, she completed her bachelor's degree in fashion design in Basel and spent a semester abroad at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague. For her master's degree, she attended the Institut Français de la Mode in Paris, where she specialized in knitwear and printing. Her final collection "The power of my hands" aims to make a feminist statement. "My collection is about women's work and how it has developed or not yet developed. My mother was the first woman to study computer science in her city. In terms of time, she was also a punk, while my grandmother was a typical subordinate housewife and master of all handicrafts. Together they taught me the importance of being yourself and standing up for women's rights. Through knitwear, I examine traditional crafts and ask the questions: How can feminism be expressed through crafts today? And why should we talk more about the vulva?".

As part of our Fashion x Craft project, her designs were presented to the professional audience at Berlin Fashion Week in January 2023 in the Berlin Salon. After an internship in the knitwear department at Kenzo, she is currently working as a freelancer in knitwear & print design, creative direction and as a portfolio consultant. Haupt plans to use the prize money from the Wilhelm Lorch Foundation for courses at the Knitwear Lab in Amsterdam, as knitting is her great passion.

Further information on Fashion X Craft can be found here. Further details can also be found in the TextilWirtschaft article here.