On 10 December 2021, will take place EFHA International Symposium, titled Crafting Heritage. Organised in collaboration with DIDA – Università degli studi Firenze and Museo del Tessuto di Prato, the online symposium will explore how fashion and its products – textiles, accessories and clothes – can inform a better understanding of the relationship between craftsmanship and heritage.

Crafts are an invisible thread that connects groups of people into communities who share the same knowledge, skills and traditions. The richness of European crafts is documented in museum and private collections, preserved by institutions able to understand and protect objects for both their material and immaterial value. These objects carry distinct features of particular traditions and tastes as well as techniques and imagination unique to the artisans who made them. Intangible knowledge, skills, techniques and traditions are just as important for the craftsmanship’s renewal in contemporary practices.

The symposium moves from these ideas and explores different definition of crafts through three main themes: Restoring, Reactivating, Resisting. It will present first-hand experiences in preserving fashion objects and the knowledge they bear in their materiality; special collaborative projects between fashion houses and local craft workshops; craft as the “language” of activism, to fight social inequalities and imagine a better future.

The symposium will be online and attendance is free. Register HERE

**The symposium fits within the framework of the project CRAFTED.

**The symposium considers fashion as starting point to reflect on human and environmental sustainability, abiding by the agenda of NEB – New European Bauhaus, of which EFHA is official partner.