GROWING IDEAS
Johanna Hehemann
Aalto University
‘Growing Ideas’ is based on my own journey growing flax as part of the Regenerative Textile Garden project in 2025. Through practice-led research, I followed the material from flax plant to fully processed linen, questioning how this new material knowledge reshaped my design decisions. Engaging in the complete transformation – breaking, scutching, hackling, and spinning – shifted my focus from finished artefacts to the material journey itself. Each piece of the final collection corresponds to a different stage of the flax-to-linen process, moving from raw materials and hand-crafts to industrial, automated processes. This also serves as a technical exploration of linen in unusual applications (e.g., knitting, needle-felting). Building the entire collection around the process challenges traditional outcome-oriented fashion and textile design practice: How can textiles communicate the stories that bring them into being? The collection replaces brand names with process photographs, the coat lining displays photographs of its full process, and a booklet decodes each step. Overall, the collection invites viewers to read garments as process and to consider the labour, skill, and material journey necessary to create them.