About

Amandine Fabry, born in 1977, is a Belgian textile designer. Her interests and career are rooted at the heart of textile materiality and its associated challenges. Active in the textile sector for more than twenty years in various roles and practices, she brings together—through the practice of weaving—her enthusiasm and her questioning around the very definition and construction of fabric itself.

Passionate about weaving, she perceives it as a language to be explored both in the design of woven textiles and in the graphic strength of their representations. She began her career as a senior designer in the automotive industry, where she led research and development for numerous commercialized models. In 2003, when the textile design program opened at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts (ArBA-EsA), she joined the teaching team and, alongside successive workshop leaders, co-developed the pedagogical project of the textile department.

The project seeks, between the lines, to contribute to a textile cultural heritage too often left on the margins. Thread is a linear element that traces lines within fabric. The stripe is therefore not emphasized arbitrarily; it honors the entire textile culture. Through its sisterhood with textile know-how, the stripe acts as a link between the earliest gestures of weaving practice and the technology employed to implement the project. The memory of these gestures nourishes the reflection necessary for the creation of these textiles. The mental visualization between the hand and the idea of a design yet to come is a condition for the possibility of innovative textile creation.

The stripe gives volume to color—or to the colors deployed within textiles. It creates a trompe-l’œil effect that generates movement in chromatic compositions. The stripe simultaneously reveals and conceals. Through its graphic strength, it maintains a form of ambiguity. Stripes attract the eye but do not hold the gaze; they are too overflowing to become still. It is this elusive, vibrant dimension, along with its fundamental kinship with fabric, that made the stripe the focal point of this research. The overlap between art and design, along with the experimentation conducted, raised ontological questions about how textiles inhabit our cultures and human narratives. The textile lexicon brought forward by this research touches upon textile history and evokes—one might say whispers—parallels between graphic expression, materiality, and history.