Weaving Stories: Gwen van den Einde on Tradition, Experimentation, and the Future of Design Education
Fashion is often perceived as a fast-moving spectacle — runways flashing with trends, brands fighting for cultural dominance, and a world of overproduction fuelled by consumer appetite. Yet, beneath this surface lies a quieter conversation about tradition, materiality, and the role of design education in cultivating authentic voices.
In a recent conversation on Design Education Talks, I spoke with Gwen van den Einde, Head of Apparel Design at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). French and Dutch by background, educated in Strasbourg, and now based in the United States, Gwen has built a career at the intersection of costume design, performance, and academia. His perspective highlights both the fragility and the promise of teaching fashion today.
From Experimental Costumes to the Classroom
Gwen’s path into teaching was entirely serendipitous. In 2010, during a residency at the Kuzhastovsky Castle for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, he presented a set of experimental costumes in the monumental Palace of Culture and Science. Following her performance, he was invited to engage with students at Warsaw’s fashion department. That initial workshop — examining Polish traditional dress in an ethnographic museum — sparked a teaching journey that later took him to France, and ultimately to RISD.
“It was a coincidence,” he says. “But what struck me was how powerful it was to put young designers in dialogue with tradition. These garments, made by people who never went to art school, carried colour, pattern, and design intelligence that felt timeless.”
This attention to tradition as a living source has remained central to his teaching. In an era where digital tools dominate, Gwen insists on the irreplaceable tactility of textiles. The act of touching, stitching, and constructing remains, in his view, essential to cultivating deeper artistic understanding.
Navigating Environmental Pressures and Student Freedom
Teaching apparel design in 2025 means contending with immense pressures: sustainability, ethical production, and social expectations of body and beauty. Yet, at RISD, Gwen emphasises the importance of protecting students from premature industry constraints.
“Our students create small collections, entirely made by hand,” he explains. “We want them to articulate their aesthetic vision, their sense of craft, and their ability to construct silhouettes. The realities of industrial production will come later. Right now, their focus should be on developing their own voice.”
By encouraging upcycling and sustainable approaches while resisting overemphasis on mass production, Gwen’s department ensures that students explore both the conceptual and the craft-based dimensions of design.
Storytelling Through Clothing
For Gwen, apparel design is inseparable from storytelling. His own creative practice in experimental costume design and opera underscores this conviction.
Opera, he argues, is one of the most interdisciplinary art forms, blending music, set, costume, and movement into a total experience. Early opera, particularly in the Baroque era, fascinates her for the way costumes transformed performers into “dynamic sculptures in space.”
This philosophy carries into his teaching. Students are encouraged not merely to design garments, but to construct worlds around them. “Who is this person? How do they move? What space do they inhabit?” Gwen challenges his students to situate their designs within larger narratives, whether imagined operas, films, or performances. Such approaches ensure that garments are not just objects, but bearers of meaning, stories worn on the body.
Balancing Heritage and Innovation
Gwen’s collaborations with houses like Hermès and Tiffany highlight the delicate dance between heritage and innovation. “You cannot create something disconnected from the legacy of these houses,” she notes. At Tiffany, his research into Jean Schlumberger’s whimsical mid-century jewellery revealed how storytelling and heritage anchor even the most innovative projects. This sensibility flows into his pedagogy. Students, too, must root their work in stories, whether personal, cultural, or historical. “The work cannot be random,” he insists. “There needs to be a point of reference, a narrative thread.”
Protecting the Incubator
Perhaps Gwen’s strongest conviction is that art schools must remain incubators for ideas. He cautions against the growing alignment of fashion education with industry projects. “It’s interesting to collaborate with industry,” he says, “but art school should first be a space of freedom, creativity, and experimentation.”
Gwen stresses the importance of maintaining intimacy in scale. At RISD, the apparel department is deliberately small, allowing faculty to know each student personally and support their growth. In contrast, he points to schools graduating hundreds of students annually, where employability becomes precarious and individual attention is diluted. “Quality conversations are what matter,” he insists. “If you don’t have them in art school, when will you?”
Rethinking the Fashion Show
One of the most pressing questions for Gwen and his colleagues worldwide concerns the future of the fashion show. Should schools continue mimicking industry runways? Or is there room for alternative modes of presentation, operatic stagings, interdisciplinary performances, immersive installations?
He believes more time is needed to explore new ways of presenting student work. “Our students deserve professional platforms,” he says, “but we must also ask: can we showcase garments differently? Can we create productions, worlds, even operas, instead of just shows?”
The Audience Problem
A recurring theme in our exchange was the role of the audience. In fashion — and in art more broadly — the success of design depends on the connoisseurship of its viewers. “You can create the most extraordinary work,” Gwen reflects, “but what if the audience cannot recognise it?”
This is not merely a question of taste, but of education. Historically, audiences had the cultural literacy to situate innovation within tradition. Today, the abundance of content online and the dominance of consumer culture risk flattening this sensitivity. The result, as Gwen notes, is a “creativity fatigue” within luxury houses, and an audience less prepared to receive experimental work.
Seeds for the Future
Despite the challenges, Gwen remains hopeful. He sees design education as planting seeds — small groups of students nurtured in intimacy, who may flourish in unpredictable ways over decades.
“Not everyone will become the next creative director at Dior,” he admits. “But that’s fine. Some may move into film, textiles, journalism, or entirely new disciplines. What matters is that they carry with them a strong identity, rooted in their own research and craft.” For Gwen, the measure of success in design education is not immediate employability, but long-term impact: nurturing voices, cultivating criticality, and defending the role of art schools as spaces of imagination.
Conclusion: Beyond Fashion
Listening to Gwen van den Einde, one is reminded that design education is not just about fashion. It is about how we, as a society, engage with heritage, materiality, creativity, and meaning. It is about balancing freedom with responsibility, storytelling with sustainability, individuality with collective culture.
In a world rushing towards fast solutions and digital spectacles, Gwen makes a compelling case for slowness, tactility, and depth. He envisions the art school not as an extension of industry, but as an incubator of imagination.
And perhaps, in these uncertain times, that reminder, that art schools must remain places of freedom, where seeds of new worlds are planted — is more radical than ever.
Listen to the full podcast here.
Find more about Gwens work: https://gvde.net/ and https://www.instagram.com/gwen_van_den_eijnde
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Since its inception in 2019, Design Education Talks podcast has served as a dynamic platform for the exchange of insights and ideas within the realm of art and design education. This initiative sprang from a culmination of nearly a decade of extensive research conducted by Lefteris Heretakis. His rich background, intertwining academia, industry, and student engagement, laid the foundation for a podcast that goes beyond the conventional boundaries of educational discourse. See our work on 👉https://linktr.ee/thenewartschool Follow us on twitter at 👉@newartschool Read our latest articles at 👉https://newartschool.education/ and 👉https://heretakis.medium.com/ and 👉 https://odysee.com/@thenewartschool:c
