Why Fashion Council Germany sent five fashion designers to the UK to learn craft skills like basket weaving

Ebay’s involvement signals that craft revival and circularity are no longer separate conversations in fashion. FCG has partnered with Ebay Germany on other projects, including recently launching Raum.Berlin, a three-day showcase for emerging fashion talent during Berlin Fashion Week, which debuted at its June edition. The Fashion x Craft partnership takes this a step further. “To create a more circular and sustainable fashion future, you need to think about products from design through to production,” explains Kirsty Keoghan, GM of European fashion at Ebay.

In a fashion industry where ‘craft’ often functions as a marketing buzzword and ‘circularity’ as a compliance target, programmes like Fashion x Craft are experimenting with how to make both more tangible. By teaching designers to adapt centuries-old skills to secondhand materials, aided by new technologies, they are preparing the next wave of designers who can bridge emotional storytelling with the operational realities of a lower impact supply chain.

Listening to the materials

Highgrove is one of several sites operated by The King’s Foundation, the charity established by King Charles III to promote education, sustainability, farming and traditional crafts. (One of its other sites, Dumfries House in Ayrshire, Scotland, is the home of The King’s Foundation’s Modern Artisan fashion programme.) Alongside teaching crafts such as wood carving, Highgrove hosts embroidery and millinery fellowships run in partnership by The King’s Foundation and Chanel.

Lipinski says he considered a couple of local organisations in Germany to host the skills section of the Fashion x Craft programme, but settled on the idea of a residency in the UK because of the FCG’s long-standing relationship with The King’s Foundation (they co-host an annual student conference in Scotland), and because he wanted to let the designers “escape their normal environment”. He explains: “They are free to have that creativity explode and to fully focus on what they’re doing. And I’ve never seen facilities like those run by The King’s Foundation, nor met anyone comparable to the people that work here [at Highgrove]. They are so full of dedication.”

When I visit, the gardens make clear why the site is so well suited to such programmes. In the Stumpery — a Victorian-style grove of ferns and upturned tree stumps — a “wall of gifts” displays hand-carved architectural stone made by The King’s Foundation’s past students. Nearby, willow sculptures of woodland creatures by Yorkshire-based artist Emma Stothard stand between the trees. Even the fragrant kitchen garden, heavy with pears and plums, speaks to the value of local production — a concept increasingly relevant to supply chain resilience in fashion.