A fair society in harmony with nature has always been the dream of Vanessa Colignon, founder of Design for Resilience. And to achieve this, she has decided to tackle a major problem: the fashion and textile industry.
Because in the end, textile design and sewing are what she has always been passionate about! Born in Charleroi in 1989, Vanessa started her secondary education in fashion and clothing. She graduated in 2008 with the title of seamstress, pattern maker and pattern cutter (creation of made-to-measure clothes). In 2009, she became an assistant designer. Her graduation collection won 2nd prize from the jury and the public. At the same time, she studied weaving and textile design at the Academy of Fine Arts of Charleroi. In 2010, she joins the fashion design section of La Cambre. However, as she no longer finds meaning in the fashion sector in the face of environmental issues, she decides to take to the road.
It is by noticing the extent of the environmental and socio-economic impacts of the textile industry that she decided to focus her research on natural and ecological textile fibres.
In order to understand each stage of textile production, she has worked in various fashion houses and ecocenter that are self-sufficient in terms of textile production. Her goal? To understand how to produce a garment or fabric in a way that respects workers, the living world and animal welfare.
In this search for a fairer production, she followed a training in agroecology in 2015, as well as a training in naturalism in 2016. In 2019, she decided to specialise in knitwear design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels.