Simon Angel has been curating the Sustainable Innovations Area at KEYHOUSE since 2018. For the January 2026 edition, Sustainable Innovations once again brings together projects that question, provoke, and expand the future of textiles. Register now to attend Sustainable Innovations at KEYHOUSE.

When you curate SUSTAINABLE INNOVATIONS, what tells you a project is genuinely worth platforming, beyond novelty or technical achievement?

Simon Angel: For me, novelty by itself is never enough, I always search behind the curtains, looking for stories, paradoxes, pain, pleasure and purpose. Technical achievement is important, but it is only a starting point. What I look for is whether a project asks an honest question about how we live, make, and value. A project becomes worth platforming when it shows responsibility towards material, culture, and consequence. That responsibility can take many forms. In Marie Vilay’s work, it appears as care for knowledge, authorship, and continuity. In Materia Futura, it emerges as a refusal to accept that sustainability must look deprived or emotionally flat. In Threaded Protocols, it shows up as a quiet but powerful re-examination of how technology itself is constructed. What connects them is not perfection, but intention. They are not trying to impress the industry. They are trying to understand it, and sometimes to gently disturb it; reframing or disrupt the ‘pattern’ of the industry. That is where I feel Sustainable Innovations has its real value.

Looking at this year’s exhibitors, what do you feel they have in common?

Simon Angel: What they share is a deep awareness that textiles are not neutral. Whether it is Marie Vilay questioning how textile knowledge travels across cultures or Materia Futura reclaiming sensory desire in bio-based materials, each project understands textiles as carriers of history, power, emotion, and choice. They are not interested in materials as surfaces alone. They are interested in materials as systems of meaning. And importantly, none of them treats sustainability as a technical checklist. They treat it as a cultural responsibility. Textile with layers of different understandings, functions and conscious.

Many innovations struggle at the point of scale. What responsibility, if any, do curators and platforms have in addressing that gap?

Simon Angel: We cannot solve scale for innovators, but we can change how scale is understood. Too often, scale is presented as the only measure of success. But some projects are not meant to scale in the conventional sense. Their value lies in how they influence thinking, education, or future processes. As curators, our responsibility is to provide context. To connect exploratory work with industry actors who can interpret, adapt, or carry those ideas forward responsibly. To prevent innovation from being consumed only as trend material. Scale should be a conversation, a question mark maybe, but not a demand.