MoMu is proud that the International Woolmark Prize 2013 went to Christian Wijnants, following in the footsteps op people like Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld. The award ceremony was presented at an event last Saturday evening during London Fashion Week. The judging panel included oa Victoria Beckham, Donatella Versace, Diane von Furstenberg, Franca Sozzani and Tim Blanks. More than 70 nominees were initially selected by various fashion industry nominating bodies from across the globe. The award is relaunched by Woolmark to help promote outstanding design talent around the world and the innovative use of fibre and Merino wool.

Wijnants is one of Belgium’s most beloved knitwear designers with a very well developed innovative technique and artistic approach to knitwear. He has such a passion for knitwear that experimenting and trying out new techniques are the things he loves the most. Wijnants used to teach at the Fashion Department of the Royal Academy in Antwerp, stimulating students to play and experiment with knitwear in their collections.
Installation ‘Hommage to Ann Saelens’ by Hilde Frunt (left) and Christian Wijnants (right) at the ‘Unravel: Knitwear in Fashion’ exhibition, 2011, Photography: Frederik Vercruysse

In 2011, MoMu organized the ‘Unravel: Knitwear in Fashion’ exhibition with an installation of 3 new dresses by Wijnants commissioned for the exhibition. For these silhouettes Wijnants experimented with different techniques he used in his A/W 2005-06 and A/W 2008-09 collections, blending them into a new look. More specifically, he combined the ‘open’ and circular knitwear, used in his Ann Salens tribute collection of A/W 2005-06 (made to look like crochet) with the tie-n-dye techniques used in his A/W 2008-09 collection. He then turned the dresses inside out to show the purl side, which gives a pixelated effect. On top of that, he unraveled a part of the dress after dyeing it, reuniting it by hand on the machine.

Taking these experiments as the basis for his further development and play with these themes, he developed the collection which was granted the International Woolmark Prize.