FASHION X CRAFT Reverses the Crossing: Britain’s Craft Tutors Head to Brandenburg

For four editions, the program’s designers crossed to England to learn craft. This October, The King’s Foundation’s tutors travel the other way, to a village in the Uckermark.

On October 5, eight young designers leave Berlin for Gerswalde, a municipality of roughly 1,500 people in Brandenburg’s Uckermark district, to spend three weeks at the workbench. Four of them come from Germany: Anne Kathrin Bodach, Alina Nazari, Lukas Roßkamp, and Vivien Vetterkind. Four come from the United Kingdom: Genaro Alberto Rivas Ravelo, Rachel Lucretia McComb, Holly Shih, and Isabelle Pennington-Edmead. A jury of experts from both countries chose them for the fifth edition of FASHION X CRAFT, the talent program Fashion Council Germany has run with The King’s Foundation since 2022, and the group met for the first time at a kick-off in Berlin on September 28 and 29.

The even split is the structural change that matters most. The 2026/27 call was open to fashion and textile design graduates whose degree had been awarded within the previous two years and who live in Germany or the United Kingdom, with residence in one of the two countries required for the whole project period. Earlier cohorts came through a selection run from Berlin and built largely around German-based graduates; this one reserves half its seats for designers based in Britain, which turns what was mostly a German program with an English residency into something much closer to a bilateral exchange. The Fashion Council covers every participant’s travel costs for the length of the project.

 

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Signal. What happened: Fashion Council Germany named the eight participants of the 2026/27 FASHION X CRAFT edition, the first to divide its places evenly between German and British graduates and the first to hold its craft residency in Germany rather than England. Exact object: a three-week craft residency at Werkhaus Stöckle in Gerswalde, Uckermark, followed by a design phase in which each participant produces two fashion designs and a reinterpretation of the Lands’ End tote bag, using deadstock material supplied by ZEROW. When and where: the residency runs October 5 to 26, 2026 in Gerswalde; results go on show at Berlin Fashion Week in early 2027, the autumn/winter 2027 season, and at an exhibition in the UK in summer 2027. Source: Fashion Council Germany’s own program page and participant announcement, with the venue and partner details matching Fashion Today’s report on the new edition. Why it matters: the program’s center of gravity shifts from a royal estate in Gloucestershire to rural Brandenburg, while an American heritage brand and German federal culture funding step into a project previously carried by foundations and a marketplace platform. 

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Until this year, the craft residency was the part of FASHION X CRAFT that happened in England. The first edition in 2022 sent its designers to Highgrove, the Gloucestershire estate where The King’s Foundation runs specialist education workshops, for three weeks of basket weaving, decorative plasterwork and woodcarving. Highgrove stayed central right through the 2025 cycle, when the fourth edition’s designers divided their residency between the estate and the Good Garment Collective in Berlin.

Now the direction reverses. From October 5 to 26, the residency runs at Werkhaus Stöckle in Gerswalde, and it is The King’s Foundation’s tutors who cross the Channel. They will lead workshops on traditional British craft techniques, complemented by sessions with local artists. Neither the tutors nor the local artists have been named, and the announcement does not list which disciplines will be taught this time, so the exact shape of the three weeks remains unpublished. Past rounds give a sense of the range: alongside basket weaving and woodwork, the 2025 cohort learned natural dyeing, loom weaving, bobbin lace-making and metalwork, several of them disciplines with no direct link to garment making at all.

Gerswalde is a quiet place to stage that kind of immersion. The municipality sits in the Uckermark, the rural district that fills Brandenburg’s far northeast, and its population has been thinning for well over a century, from more than 3,300 residents in 1875 to roughly 1,500 by the end of 2022. Beyond its name and its village address, little has been published about the Werkhaus Stöckle space itself, which makes the residency’s eventual output the most likely place to learn what the building offered.

Brandenburg is not the end of the travel. On November 4, the participants head to Dumfries House in East Ayrshire, The King’s Foundation’s headquarters, for the Fashion Future Conference, the annual Germany and UK gathering the Fashion Council and the foundation stage in Scotland. The 2023 edition, held under the motto “Disruption,” drew more than 100 participants from both countries for workshops, panels and guest lectures, with that year’s FASHION X CRAFT designers among them. After Scotland comes the long middle stretch: from November through the end of January, the eight develop their designs, supported by webinars and mentoring sessions.

 

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FASHION X CRAFT began as a three-way partnership between Fashion Council Germany, the Swarovski Foundation and what was then called The Prince’s Foundation. Its first cohort of eight presented nine looks, eight physical and one animated, at Der Berliner Salon, the Fashion Council’s showcase format, in its new home at the Kulturforum. Taskin Goec, a Kunsthochschule Berlin graduate, was part of that first group, and the program’s alumni have since gone on to build labels of their own and show them at Berlin Fashion Week.

By the fourth edition the partner list had shifted. eBay Germany came on as the Fashion Council’s partner for the program, the cohort shrank to five, and for the first time participants were asked to develop a full collection of several looks instead of a single piece. Those five designers, Aleksander Kudrischow (HAW Hamburg), Jon Liesenfeld (AMD), Laura De Sousa (University of Lisbon), Lennart Bohle (Pforzheim University) and Melanie Parzenczewski (HTW Berlin), worked together as the V-Collective and produced a 24-piece collection drawing on the dyeing, weaving and lace techniques they had learned, with basketry, metalwork and woodwork folded in. Every garment was cut from deadstock, the unused fabrics and fibers left over by larger companies, supplied through eBay Germany and ZEROW.

That collection went on public view in Fashion x Craft: Echoes of Tomorrow, which ran at Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie from January 30 to May 31, 2026, opening during Berlin Fashion Week. The exhibition framed the work around craft as a dialogue between generations, a way of passing experience from older hands to younger ones, and that idea carries straight into the language around this year’s edition.

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The new commercial partner is Lands’ End, named official project partner for 2026/27 through its UK-based European division. The company, which began in 1963 as a mail-order business selling sailing gear and is now headquartered in Dodgeville, Wisconsin, has long run a European operation out of England, and that British base is what plugs it into a program now split between the two countries.

Its contribution goes beyond a logo on the press materials. Every participant has to produce a reinterpretation of the Lands’ End tote bag alongside their two fashion designs. The canvas tote is the brand’s best-known object: Lands’ End traces it to an early catalog listing that pitched it for the beach and the boat, and over the decades it has become a fixture of monogram culture, sold in sizes running from oversized open-tops down to a keyring min.

A fixed object makes for a very different brief from an open-ended look. The sil, the proportions and the basic job of the bag are already settled, which leaves material, construction and surface as the variables the designers actually control. Those happen to be the areas a craft residency is built to retrain, so the eight totes should show quite directly what three weeks of British and German workshop teaching does to a designer’s hands, more legibly than a single runway look might.

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Material for those reinterpretations comes from ZEROW, which returns after supplying the V-Collective. Founded in Florence by Gabriele Rorandelli and Alessio Troisi, ZEROW sells surplus textiles and leather from the Italian luxury supply chain, online and through physical showrooms, to designers who need modest quantities rather than full production runs. The platform says it now serves more than 3,000 customers across 40 countries, with a catalog of over 10,000 textile and leather items.

Germany has become one of its priority markets. ZEROW opened its first permanent German showroom on January 30, 2026, inside the experimental Studio183 space at the Bikini Berlin mall, timed to Berlin Fashion Week and to the opening of Echoes of Tomorrow, which it presented alongside the Fashion Council. A three-day Berlin showroom event followed in late May, aimed squarely at local brands and designers, and several Berlin labels already cut from its stock.

For FASHION X CRAFT, the pairing sets up a tension the participants will have to resolve one way or another. The Lands’ End tote is a utilitarian object, built to be hosed off and hauled around, while ZEROW’s inventory is the leftover cloth and leather of Italian luxury houses. How each designer bridges that gap, with structure, with handwork, or by leaning into the contrast, is the most open variable in the whole brief.

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German federal culture funding enters the program for the first time this edition. The office of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, currently held by Wolfram Weimer, is supporting the project alongside The King’s Foundation and Lands’ End. Scott Lipinski, the Scottish-born CEO of Fashion Council Germany, summed up the premise in a sentence: craft “lives through passing skills on,” and FASHION X CRAFT is where that handover happens. He described the joint backing of the commissioner and The King’s Foundation as an important signal about how craftsmanship, sustainability and international cultural exchange are valued.

The King’s Foundation’s involvement long predates the program. Charles established the charity in 1990, as Prince of Wales, and it now operates from Dumfries House in East Ayrshire, its headquarters and main education campus, while acting as custodian of Highgrove Gardens since 2021. Its Future Textiles program, launched at Dumfries House in 2014 after an industry roundtable on protecting the hand skills behind the UK fashion industry, has reached more than 7,000 people across the foundation’s sites. That body of teaching is what the tutors bring to Gerswalde.

Fashion Council Germany is the younger institution. Founded in Berlin in 2015 by a group of industry figures including Christiane Arp, who chairs it, the council has grown into the organization coordinating Berlin Fashion Week as well as a cluster of talent and education initiatives. FASHION X CRAFT is the one most squarely concerned with hand skills.

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Both countries get a finish line. Once the design phase closes at the end of January, the results will be presented during Berlin Fashion Week in early 2027, the autumn/winter 2027 season, in a slot the Fashion Council has placed in January or February without yet naming exact dates or a venue. The work then crosses to the UK for an exhibition in summer 2027, inside a window the council’s own timeline sets between March and August. No British venue has been announced.

The arithmetic of the brief is already fixed. Two fashion designs and one reworked tote from each of the eight participants adds up to sixteen designs and eight bags, twenty-four objects in all, the same count as the collection the V-Collective showed at the Gemäldegalerie this spring.