AWOW is a research initiative inspired by heritage craft and craftspeople in rural China. With continuous research and design development activities happening in China and the Netherlands, it aims to be a means to retain the fast-disappearing minority craft skills and re-engage urban consumers with them.
AWOW is a timeless, customized and multifunctional product, using small manufacture to promise long-lasting and durable garments and nurturing the revival of traditional craft.
AWOW is not only a consumer product that seeks a place within contemporary value systems, but is also an attempt to encourage proactive relationships among individuals, families, and communities through garments and their stories.
AWOW seeks to provide "personality" in clothing in today's society, and to bring a set of personal expressions in one-of-a-kind clothing to surpass new designs with short-lived trends.
AWOW is a archive of clothing in which the stories of twenty individuals of different age, gender, nationality and lifestyle live on.
AWOW is a method of merging clothing and stories together to remember the people who created knowledge with their hands, and non-market forms of exchange.
AWOW reveals many fragile connections between lives and encourages a cherishing of - and a paying attention to - our living surroundings, while dealing with the boundaries of clothing and time, and how these can be enriched at their very limits.