In 2019-2020, at the invitation of the Slovak presidency of the PCCE, HEAD – Genève was honoured as the guest partner of the five countries of the platform to set up a project combining the traditional craft of Blueprinting with contemporary fashion design. The Fashion in blue & Blueprint in design workshop provided a unique opportunity to focus on craft and materiality as a common fabric, which crosses cultural and language barriers and fuses past and present. After a demonstration of blue dying by master dyers and an initiation to indigo dye techniques, HEAD fashion design students received several lengths of eastern European Blueprint fabric. They created outfits that explored their own cultural roots all the while reinterpreting the traditions, craft and folklore of the PCCE countries.

Skirting the sterile oppositions between craft and industry, artisan and designer, as well as the vexed issue of cultural appropriation, the Fashion in blue & Blueprint in design workshop encouraged the re-appropriation of both a personal and national heritage, with the intent of furthering textile and fashion creative expertise. Recent fashion collections, from sportswear to couture, have proved that traditional crafts and contemporary design work hand in hand to renew the language of apparel. In tune with the major shift of values brought about by a world sanitary crisis, Fashion in blue & Blueprint in design is a tribute to a more human centred and sustainable practice of fashion design upheld by HEAD – Genève’s Fashion design department.

The French poet Paul Eluard’s verse La terre est bleue comme une orange - “The earth is blue as an orange” could be the motto of the workshop Fashion in blue & Blueprint in design. The fascinating colour blue which has bound communities together for centuries in the creation of fabric, has inspired multiple and variegated fashion designs created by students from around the world who gather at HEAD – Genève to open new paths for craft and design through the poetics of dress and the rewriting of its fundamental materials.