INTERWOVEN

Event

Manchester Fashion Week: INTERWOVEN

09 September 2026 - 20 September 2026

Castlefield Gallery

Manchester changed the world through textiles. The mills, makers and innovators of the North transformed how the world produced, traded and wore cloth. Today, that legacy presents a new challenge: how do we reimagine fashion for the next generation?

INTERWOVEN brings together artists, educators and communities to explore that question. It celebrates the belief that the future of fashion will not be shaped by one discipline or one voice – it will be created through collaboration.

At the heart of the exhibition is The Universal Tee of Life, a large-scale community installation by hundreds of young people from primary and secondary schools across Greater Manchester with Stitched Up CIC who transformed donated T-shirts into individual textile artworks expressing their hopes and visions for the future – representing a powerful symbol of collective action.

INTERWOVEN also presents excerpts from three exhibitions shown in the British Textile Biennial 2025 (BTB25) asking where our clothes come from. The Materials Library is an exploration of natural fibres, regenerative resources and next-generation materials while The Synthetic Revolution traces the cultural and environmental history and legacy of synthetic textiles – inviting audiences to explore how the materials we choose shape our lives, economies and environment. Woven Worlds is a distinctive fashion collection created by Godfrey Katende of IGC Fashion, Uganda in collaboration with Salford Slow Fashion, born from their shared dedication to ethical textiles and awareness of the colonial impacts of the textile industry past and present.

a large orange piece of fabtic hangs from a ceiling. It is in a large room, one side is white walls, the other side is exposed brick.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new short film Will-of-the-Wisp (2026), developed by Pippa Eason and Nick Booton in collaboration with Manchester Fashion Week. Will-of-the-Wisp knits together documentation of makers – their practices and processes, including footage contributed from the British Textile Biennial, and that of our natural environment. The film invites reflection on the choices of fashion today. It is a meditation on attention, care, and interdependence, asking how we might establish healthier relationships between our natural resources and personal choices, and advocating for a rediscovery of our relationship with the natural world and with one another.

Presented by the Northern Fashion Collective as part of Manchester Fashion Week, in collaboration with Castlefield Gallery, British Textile Biennial and Manchester artists, Pippa Eason and Nick Booton.

The exhibiton is visitable from 9-20 September, during our regular opening hours of 12 – 5:30pm, Wednesday to Sunday.