Situated textiles, inhabited textiles. From bioregionalist narratives to socio-technical networks : textile practices between memory, tools, resources and territories

Overwiew

Contemporary textile production is characterized by a deep disconnection between natural resources, territories, know-how and uses. Since the 1970s, globalization has fragmented value chains, shifting manufacturing activities towards low-cost production zones, while countries such as France have refocused on design. This process has contributed to the erosion of local industries and to an increased dependency on distant resources, techniques and infrastructures. The result is a largely unmoored productive system in which the links between materials, gestures and territories have become stretched thin. In parallel, the dominant model rests on the intensive exploitation of resources, drawing on synthetic fibers derived from fossil fuels, monocultures, and transformation processes that are heavy consumers of water and chemical substances. Beyond their environmental impacts, these dynamics are part of a deeper rupture: a loss of understanding and ownership of technical processes. Machines, once embedded in situated social and territorial contexts, tend to become opaque systems, contributing to a form of dispossession with regard to textile matter.

This work proposes to pull the thread of this dispossession in order to interrogate its causes and implications. It posits that the current fragmentation of textile industries is not solely the result of globalized economic logics, but stems from a rupture in the socio-technical networks that historically connected resources, tools, know-how and environments. From this perspective, relocalization cannot be conceived as a mere geographical shift, but as a reconfiguration of these relationships. Bioregionalism serves here as both a theoretical and operational framework for thinking through this transformation. Grounded in an ecological reading of territories, it invites us to organize human activities in accordance with the dynamics inherent to environments : watersheds, soils, climates. However, its application to textiles remains largely unexplored. Yet this field appears particularly relevant for testing its limits and potentialities, given its rootedness in localized resources and its dependence on hydrological systems.

By intersecting the notion of the watershed with that of the "textile basin" or “textileshed”, this research proposes to weave connections between ecological and socio-technical dimensions. The textile basin is conceived as a territorial unit structured by flows of materials, tools, know-how and infrastructures. Water plays a central role within it, simultaneously as a resource, a medium of transformation, and a vector of connection. This approach makes it possible to re-inscribe production processes within coherent systems, in which the memory of practices, material conditions and contemporary organizations are articulated together.

Drawing on a literature review, the analysis of current initiatives, and a territorial grounding situated in a cross-border Alpine territory, this work argues that textiles constitute a central lever for thinking through bioregional transitions. The aim is less to optimize impacts than to transform the very logics of production, by re-articulating resources, techniques and uses.

The guiding thread of this research is thus that of situated and inhabited textiles: textiles whose production engages relationships between humans, tools and environments, and which contribute to the reactivation of production networks anchored in their territories. By mobilizing design as a practice of inquiry and mediation, this research helps to sketch the conditions for the emergence of textile systems capable of reconciling memory, techniques and contemporaneity.

PhD Supervisor:

Aurélien Fouillet, CRD (centre de recherche en design), école doctorale Sciences Sociales et Humanités (ED SSH, n° 629).

Phd Cosupervisors:

Axelle Grégoire, architecte-cartographe, docteure MNHN
Hélène Lemaire, enseignante dans le département Design Textile, ENSCI-Les Ateliers

Funding:
Partenariat d'entreprise à 100 %, LUMA Arles pour un doctorat au sein d’Atelier LUMA

Date of registration: november 24th 2025
Date of viva voce : december 2028.