Johanna Hehemann
Fashion, Clothing and Textile Design MA
Aalto University
Specialisms: Textiles - Knit / Textiles - Print / Atelier - Pattern Cutting
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Johanna Hehemann
First Name: Johanna
Last Name: Hehemann
Specialisms: Textiles - Knit / Textiles - Print / Atelier - Pattern Cutting
Sectors:
My Location: Helsinki, Finland
University / College: Aalto University
Course / Program Title: Fashion, Clothing and Textile Design MA
About
Fashion & Textile Designer working on the intersection of craft, material exploration, and storytelling. My practice involves textile and dressmaking crafts such as knitwear, pattern making, and surface pattern design. Through working with a textile garden and completing a minor in textile chemistry I was able to learn about and gain hands-on experience in the full journey from raw material to finished fabric. Using visual communication and textile crafts, I translate these explorations into comprehensible narratives that highlight the complex and skilful work behind textile making.
‘Growing Ideas’ is based on my own journey growing flax as part of the Regenerative Textile Garden project in 2025. Through practice-led research, I followed the material from flax plant to fully processed linen, questioning how this new material knowledge reshaped my design decisions. Engaging in the complete transformation – breaking, scutching, hackling, and spinning – shifted my focus from finished artefacts to the material journey itself. Each piece of the final collection corresponds to a different stage of the flax-to-linen process, moving from raw materials and hand-crafts to industrial, automated processes. This also serves as a technical exploration of linen in unusual applications (e.g., knitting, needle-felting). Building the entire collection around the process challenges traditional outcome-oriented fashion and textile design practice: How can textiles communicate the stories that bring them into being? The collection replaces brand names with process photographs, the coat lining displays photographs of its full process, and a booklet decodes each step. Overall, the collection invites viewers to read garments as process and to consider the labour, skill, and material journey necessary to create them.
Competitions
