Meet Belinda Gredig: The Swedish winner of the BIAAF Fashion Design award 2024

With an academic background in fashion design with knitwear from Central Saint Martins and textile design specialising in weaving from the Swedish School of Textiles, Belinda Gredig is a designer revolutionising how textiles and fashion mesh together.

Gredig's love of textiles has led to her using some unusual materials to create her designs such as nettles and glass. "As a child, I got to spend the summer with my uncle, a botanist and specialist in healing plants," says Gredig, talking about how her relationship with nettles manifested. "He had a special love for the nettle and a field of nettles next to his house. This bond with the plant fascinated me as the rest of the family would treat the nettle as a pest plant in the garden." Her fascination with nettles reignited during the Covid-19 pandemic, as she learned how to hand-spin them into yarn for her pieces. "The pandemic gave me time to regenerate from old patterns taught by industry," she says. "I took the time to restore and became engaged with the nettles in front of my door and aware of the various parallels we share."

While nettles stemmed from her childhood, Gredig accredits using glass to her time in London at Central Saint Marins, where she began to experiment with it to act as a counterpart to the weaves of her nettle fibre. "Hand-shaped glass elements make clear hidden tensions and create counter forces," Gredig says of the relationship between the two. "The burning and clarifying force of nettle transforms into a vitreous state through flamework, which is an underrepresented technique within glassworks compared to furnace glassblowing throughout the whole of Scandinavia."

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'Spinning Figure', Gredig's winning design, is comprised of both of these materials. "The piece consists of 2,500 hand-shaped glass rings interlinked with each other, which took 20 days," says Gredig, speaking of the craft behind the piece. "The woven part is made from hand-spun nettle yarn which took seven days to spin and then was handwoven-to-form, in 14 days."

The nature of such textiles means Gredig must work towards a form without knowing the result beforehand: "I had to learn to trust the process and my ability to know when to make decisions and how long to stay playful." According to the designer, this process has helped her unlearn patterns of the past that no longer serve her practice. As stated by the BIAAF jury, the spinning, coiling and fusing of these materials was what ultimately swayed Gredig's win. "The atmosphere in Bilbao was mind-blowing because I got to talk to such a prestigious jury about my work," says Gredig of her triumph. "The moment when they called my name was an emotional ride."

So what will be next for the designer? 'The performative aspect in ['Spinning Figure'] has been a new path for me which I would like to explore further in the future," says Gredig. "I want to extend my new knowledge of textile's affinity with fashion and better define the crafted space we have started to discover." In the meantime, she will be making the most of the portfolio consulting session with Elisa Palomino, which came as part of her prize, using the enrichment and support to develop her plans for the future. But ultimately, Gredig says, "my goal is to harness my anger about the non-equal relationship between fashion and textiles through fashioning other life forms."