Mohawk Group is proud to support the annual Dorothy Waxman Textile Prize and celebrate the next generation of textile designers. With 360 entries from design students around the world from 54 countries and 220 schools, the jury reviewed work from 20 finalists.
This year’s competition revealed themes of sustainability embedded in storytelling, identity, and lived experience. From bio-based, found, and deadstock materials to deeply personal narratives, the work demonstrated how textiles can preserve memory, express identity, and transform cultural traditions. While these stories were personal, they were also universal, depicting a tender and empathic view from this generation’s lens.
The 2026 Textile Prize jury was comprised of Susan Easton from the New York Fashion Innovation Center; 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.
The winner of the Waxman Textile Prize for 2026 is Jiashun Zhou, from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Jiashun wins $5000 on behalf of Mohawk Group to continue his textile work and launch his design career.
Jiashun Zhou, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Jiashun explores how architecture, memory, and movement intersect through innovative handwoven textiles. Conceptually, the work focuses on spaces such as hallways, doorways, stages, and staircases—places of transition, waiting, and change that quietly shape our sense of identity and belonging. Working on a traditional floor loom, the warp is hand-dyed according to planned imagery. Jaishun developed a treadle-control system inspired by the Jacquard loom, allowing precise image-making while preserving the loom’s original thread-up. By selectively revealing and concealing weft colors—and twisting multiple fine yarns of different colors and materials into a single weft—the artist creates optical color mixing, tonal depth, and complex imagery within the textile.
The physical rhythm of weaving also gets embeds time and sustained labor into each textile, transforming the tapestries into architectural structures and tactile records of human emotion and experience.
Jiashun Zhou, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
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There were also three Honorable Mentions:
Phlox van Oppen from the Swedish School of Textiles: Continuous Flux is a series of woven works inspired by the life stories of six resilient women. Each woman reflected on a significant period in her life and identified a color that represented it, forming the starting point for each textile. Color becomes a language for emotion and memory, layered within the weave so that some colors are immediately visible while others remain hidden until the textile is moved or manipulated—reflecting the complex layers of human experience. The weave itself becomes the story, with the number of layers, density, color sequence, and degree of openness directly informed by each woman’s narrative. Sustainability is integral to both the making and ongoing life of the work, incorporating deadstock yarn and locally sourced Swedish wool. Designed to remain in a state of flux, the textiles can be opened, reshaped, and reconfigured for different spaces, exhibitions, and purposes. Rather than relying on rigidity for durability, the works remain alive through their capacity to transform.
Phlox van Oppen, Swedish School of Textiles
The next Honorable Mention is Yi Ding from the Institut Francais de la Mode. Faded Paper transforms traditional Chinese paper-cutting from a symbol of patriarchal control into a statement of women’s strength and independence. Inspired by the designer’s mother’s determination to achieve financial autonomy from the lingerie shop where she worked, the garments reinterpret folk motifs through 3D suspended jacquard knitwear, creating lace-like forms that appear to float freely. A zero-waste, hand-cutting methodology was used, honoring the craft’s heritage while deconstructing its traditional associations with fertility, domesticity, and women’s prescribed roles. The work becomes a tribute to resilience, reclaiming a cultural tradition through contemporary textiles.
Yi Ding, Institut Francais de la Mode
Our last Honorable Mention is Anabelen Flores Ramirez from Pontificia Universidad del Peru. This collection transforms ritual soundscapes and cultural memory into multisensory, wearable textiles, positioning garments as a living archive of Andean knowledge and identity. Drawing on rituals associated with house construction in the Peruvian Andes, sheep wool from the designer’s family’s flock is used to connect the work to land, community, and the Andean principle of reciprocity. Ritual songs are encoded into numerical systems and translated into modular patterns, while instrumental sounds are visualized through heritage patterns that make sound vibrations visible. These translations are realized through machine weaving, felting, embroidery, natural dyeing, and layered constructions of wool, cotton gauze, and cane, with sand and stones incorporated to create subtle sounds through movement.
Anabelen Flores Ramirez, Pontificia Universidad del Peru
All these projects collectively inspired us with a new way of thinking about textiles for the future. Congratulations to all the students who participated and shortlisted in the Waxman Textile Prize.