New Order of Fashion embraces Europe's "valueless" wool in Dutch Design Week exhibition

Sheep wool was presented in a new light in the Dutch Design Week exhibition Wool (Re)discovered, which aims to get visitors talking about Europe's unloved fleeces.

One-and-a-half million kilograms of wool are discarded each year in the Netherlands alone, Eindhoven-based organisation New Order of Fashion told visitors in the opening text of its exhibition.

The organisation went on to explore different ways designers and craftspeople are working with the material.

Located at New Order of Fashion's makerspace in the Strijp-S creative district, the exhibition brings together inventive garments from emerging designers, displays of local knitting, and hands-on stations where visitors can experience aspects of the wool production process or bring in clothing for repairs.

There is also a talks space where cute abstracted stuffed sheep flop over tiered bench seating, a display on Peruvian alpaca farming and a work of "garment vivisection" that pushes back against the use of animal materials.

This patchwork of sights represents different aspects of the contemporary conversation around wool among proponents of sustainable textiles.

Although wool garments in shops may be expensive, they are usually produced from specially bred sheep such as Merino, mainly in the southern hemisphere. Europe's smaller flocks of sheep have coarser wool and are typically only used for meat and dairy.

New Order of Fashion has been championing local wool through its activities over the last year and sees the undervaluing of it as an important problem to solve.

"The news came to us that 1.5 million kilograms of wool are being discarded annually in the Netherlands alone, because there's simply no economic value that the wool currently brings," New Order of Fashion director Haiko Huvenaars told Dezeen.

"Sheep are kept for either meat production, dairy or landscape management. So we're trying to explore why the wool is so valueless? And how can we change the perspective around that?"

The exhibition opens with several elaborate garment designs made from this "valueless" European wool. Collectie Arnhem's is a milk-coloured coat and headpiece made from wet-felted Dutch raw wool, its knotty, brushed texture bearing the trace of the 16 pairs of hands that worked on it together.

Sybrand Jansen's outfit manages to use wool fibres that are typically considered too short by felting them around a jute grid, creating a structured jacket with a nature-punk aesthetic, partly inspired by the Robert Eggers' film The Lighthouse.

Shushanik Droshakriyan's dark yet ethereal shepherd jacket is made from rarely used curly wool from the Swedish Gotland sheep, a fibre that the designer describes as "ancient yet futuristic".

Meanwhile, Jaden Xinyu Li's outfit is in the lineage of club kid costuming, using secondhand tweed as its material source, along with a bicycle wheel.

In the next room, a work by designer Femke de Vries addresses how the lives of the animals behind our garments are ignored in Western fashion.

In a video work titled Telling Tremors No 1: Sheep Have Good Memories, she "vivisects" a secondhand wool sweater, considering it as a "living" garment that holds the story of the animal that gave its fleece. Accompanying images from the farm convey the life of a sheep.

Wool (Re)discovered presents wool in the context of regenerative design that can be produced in harmony with the earth, nourishing and restoring ecosystems rather than only minimising harm.

Huvenaars explained that New Order of Fashion has, for several years, focused on regeneration as an ethical alternative paradigm to today's design industry norms.

"The example of wool isn't just about wool itself," Huvenaars said. "It's also about the appreciation of the source of materials. And it's not just about fashion and textiles – it's also about architecture, product design – different disciplines that can learn from the journey that we are taking together."

"Hopefully this exhibition can spark the imagination in ways that these principles and these examples can be applied in different contexts."

New Order of Fashion was started in 2012 by Ellen Albers to support emerging fashion design talents and promote circular practices. Huvenaars took over as director this year while Albers remains chair of the board.

Wool has been a recurring theme at this year's Dutch Design Week. New Order of Fashion's exhibition also echoes the subject of the Nieuwe Instituut's pop-up at this year's Paris Design Week, suggesting a growing awareness around wool waste in the European design industry.

Wool (Re)discovered is on at Dutch Design Week 2025 from 18 to 26 October at the New Order of Fashion LAB in Strijp-S. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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