Dorothy Waxman Textile Prize 2025

Mohawk Group is once again proud to sponsor the Waxman Textile Prize, an annual design competition that seeks out the emerging textile designers, now in its eleventh year.

Organized by Trend Union as part New York Textile Month each September, the 2025 Textile Prize jury was comprised of Liz Collins, textile artist and designer; Royce Epstein, Senior Director of Design Insights at Mohawk Group; Li Edelkoort and Philip Fimmano of Trend Union; and Dorothy Waxman, textile industry legend for whom the prize is named.

There were 330 entries from textile design students around the world, with a shortlist of 24 finalists. This international competition intends on advancing textiles in society, as well as preserving textile traditions for generations to come, all while looking forward.

The judges were pleased to see themes of sustainability, especially the use of natural and indigenous materials, paying homage to artisanal craft and the action of making that responds to our human condition in today’s era of global polycrisis.

There were three Honorable Mentions, and one grand winner who wins the $5000 prize money, donated by Mohawk Group.

The first honorable mention is Minerva Skyttä from Aalto University in Finland designed knit garments inspired by early 1900s correspondence between her ancestors in Finland and China, especially letters from her great-great-great-grandfather, Finland’s first missionary to China. His writings and photographs—particularly of Chinese ship sails—influenced her use of paper and cotton yarns, echoing the textures, forms, and aged qualities of the letters and the world they describe. 

Her knitwear designs are unique art pieces, not intended for mass production, as she views fashion as an art form and rejects fast fashion and overconsumption. Each garment is knitted using a Stoll industrial machine with 12-gauge density—a process she mastered through months of trial and error. She developed a seamless, sculptural knitting method that shapes garments directly on the machine, minimizing waste and enabling creative experimentation.

The next Honorable Mention is Mitsuki Murata from Bunka Gakuen University in Tokyo. Mitsuki develops textiles from recycled tarps used in farming, linking agriculture, sustainability, and craft. Woven on traditional shuttle looms to reflect the rustic refinement of rice straw crafts, these fabrics express the essence of Japanese agriculture as lived by generations of hyakusho. Unlike modern high-speed looms, these looms can handle the thickness of the filaments, allowing the creation of rare fabrics that balance craftsmanship with stable productivity.

His family has long grown rice in a mountain village, where straw was not only a byproduct but also a source of beauty and utility. Inheriting this spirit, he designs textiles that give new life to familiar materials, embodying the history and value; agriculture as both livelihood and tradition. By transforming a material associated with agriculture into fashion textiles, reliance on virgin resources is reduced while honoring and updating the striped patterns of noragi—the workwear of Japanese farmers. This work continues the values, aesthetics, and techniques, carrying tradition forward in contemporary form.

Our last Honorable Mention is Mercedes Garcia Montes from Universidad Ibero Americana Ciudad de Mexico. Her work reimagines textiles as living systems, merging ancestral craft with future-facing design. By fusing muslin, palm, and other natural fibers, garments are not stitched from flat fabric but grown as sculptural forms that adapt and move like organisms around the body. Palm pieces—originally crafted for basketry and sourced from traditional markets—are reinterpreted into frameworks that create unexpected volumes, while lightweight muslin expands their rhythm and flexibility. Every weave transforms local, hand-crafted techniques into a textile language that challenges the boundaries of conventional fashion.

Rooted in fully manual processes and biodegradable, locally sourced fibers, this work embraces minimal waste and ecological thinking. The forms grow, twist, and interlace like ecosystems, echoing resilience and interdependence in nature. Each garment becomes a lasting statement rather than a transient object, connecting body, craft, and environment. This collection envisions sustainable luxury as a dialogue between heritage and innovation—garments as enduring bonds between culture and nature, alive with meaning, resilience, and material intelligence.

The winner of the Waxman Textile Prize for 2025 is Veronica Santamaria, from the Farm to Fabric to Fashion Textile Masters at Polimoda in Florence. This six-look collection - called The Daughter of the Snake - is fully handmade from natural fibers using only manual techniques, moving from raw material gathered in the Amazon rainforest to final stitching in Italy. Every step reflects ecological intimacy, precision, and cultural awareness, honoring the ritual and symbolic power of color and fiber. Naturally dyed threads, hand-spun silks, bark cloth, and handwoven fabrics come together through macramé, embroidery, knitwear, and weaving, with waste reduced to under 5% and no synthetics used. The result is a sculptural body of work that treats fashion as a radical act of reverence for craft, nature, and ancestral knowledge.

The collection extends this spirit, weaving a narrative where material and myth converge. Inspired by the chambira fiber—locally called “the daughter of the snake”—the collection is an invocation of gratitude to Colombian territory and its Indigenous traditions. Each garment carries the essence of the Amazon, shaped through encounters with local artisans, natural dyes, and transformative craft. Fiber and color become a healing experience, connecting body, memory, and landscape in an alchemical journey from forest, to fabric, to fashion.

Congratulations Veronica for an amazing and inspirational project! All these projects collectively inspire us with a new, future way of working, which goes deeper than textiles, promoting the bonds of humanity and history, while fostering bonds with nature and our planet. And congratulations to all the students who participated and were shortlisted in the Waxman Textile Prize.