TEXTILES Over the past decade or more, The Clothworkers’ Foundation and The Clothworkers’ Company have committed close to £12 million in textiles-related support, with the categories of Academic Research and Innovation as well as Heritage and Conservation accounting for the lion’s share. From 2017, in order to allow the grants team and trustees of The Foundation to dedicate their full attention to improving the lives of people and communities facing disadvantage, we have consolidated all textiles grant-making within The Clothworkers’ Company. This decision places textiles alongside trusteeship at the heart of The Company’s mission. Groundbreaking innovation is happening in textiles, and investment in the skills that help bring this innovation to market is required. As a result, we felt it was the right time to reaffirm The Company’s roots in cloth, clarify what direction our enduring interest in textiles should take, and discover
how we might achieve the most meaningful impact on the industry. TEXTILES STRATEGY The Company aims to: • •
•
•
•
prioritise British textiles; focus on cloth, rather than costume, and on the manufacture of cloth; direct our involvement in textile design towards talented students at higher-rated institutions, with an interest in people who are studying or possess the ability to convert ideas into a product capable of being manufactured, as well as an understanding of textile technologies; rigorously explore the prospective usage of equipment that we fund; direct our support in heritage towards cataloguing, indexing, storing, conserving, displaying and improving access to important textile collections and archives.
Facing page: University of Leeds, where we support the Clothworkers’ Centre for Textile Materials Innovation in Healthcare as well as Textiles and Colour Science activities.
4
THE CLOTHWORKERS’ COMPANY
ANNUAL REVIEW 2019
5
