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The Textile Research Centre at Boerhaavelaan 6, Leiden.For three years, starting mid-2026, the Textile Research Centre, Leiden, the Netherlands, is offering a total of seven junior and four senior fellowships for up to six months each. Three fellows have already started working in Leiden (compare an interim report by Flora Kovacs-Wester), and in this call we hope to attract more candidates for a fascinating stay next year at the TRC in the historic textile city of Leiden.

The fellowships are being sponsored by the Gieskes-Strijbis Foundation, Amsterdam. Fellows are invited to carry out research based on the TRC’s extensive textiles and dress collection of more than 56,000 items (click here for the online catalogue), most of which directly accessible inside the TRC building. The junior fellows are supervised and assisted by TRC staff; senior fellows carry out independent research.

For this round, two positions are offered, one junior and one senior fellowship, starting in the spring of  2027, for a duration of up to 6 months.

Application deadline is Wednesday 16 December 2026. The selection process will be completed by mid-January and applicants will be informed by 1 February. Fellowships may start from April/May, or later, depending on personal circumstances.

Showcase with a selection of tea cosies; Temporary mini exhibition at the TRC.(1 November 2026) The TRC has a small collection of 25 tea cosies, and recently one of the TRC student/volunteers, Tina Morthier, made a small exhibition of tea cosies, which can be seen until the end of November in a special showcase on the ground floor of the TRC building. Tea cosies became popular in Western Europe in the mid-nineteenth century and were used to keep the tea pot warm and at the same time to show off needlework and knitting skills. Their use died out in the late 20th century when tea bags became widely used.

There is a crazy patchwork cosy from Australia, from 1892 (TRC 2023.1882), a cosy in the shape of a country cottage from Great Britain, from the early 20th century (TRC 2025.0429), a beaded tea cosy from 19th century Europe (TRC 2024.3105), and a knitted cosy from the 1960s, Australia (TRC 2023.1884).

And what about a small, black and hand embroidered cosy from early 20th century Netherlands (TRC 2019.2825)?

Find the books you have long been looking for, and help support the TRC by buying them! 

Following the successful book sale last summer, we organise another textile books sale on Sunday, 8 November, from 13.00 until 16.00. Hundreds of second-hand textile, clothing and accessory books will be on sale, at very reduced prices! 

The TRC regularly receives donations of books. We select them and see whether we can use them or whether the titles are already included in the extensive TRC textile library. If we cannot use the books, we very much want to pass them on to other textiles friends against a low price.

Why don't you pop in and have a look? You may find the book that you have long been looking for. You will also have the chance to see the TRC’s current exhibition about the paisley motif,  as well as seeing the TRC’s premises and garden, and of course meeting TRC staff and others.

Our address is: Boerhaavelaan 6, 2334 EN Leiden, just behind the Leiden Central Railway Station. 

This brief review of the TRC intensive 5-day textile course of 12-16 October, 2026, was written by one of the participants, Dr Tullia Fraser, assistant curator of the Huang Kam Chak collection, Durham University, UK.

Group photograph of the participants of the TRC Intensive Textile Course, taken in the central hallway of Boerhaavelaan 6, 12-16 October 2026

Last week I attended the Five-Day Intensive Course organised by the Textile Research Centre (TRC), Leiden. Delivered by a formidable team who are such knowledgeable custodians of a ‘living archive’ global collection from which there is much to learn. This experience has inspired new questions and made me look at, research, interpret, teach, talk about (etc.) the textiles in the Huang Kam Chak Yee Collection in an entirely new light: from Late Qing pouches, men’s jackets, to qipao tailored in the 1990s.

This experience feeds into ongoing exciting projects around the Huang Kam Chak Yee Collection, so always more to come. In the meantime, if you are curious about Mrs Huang’s collection, including fashion and foodways, please get in touch.

This mini-exhibition at the TRC is curated by Minsook Kang, who is an intern at the TRC from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. She is a visual artist and researcher working across textiles, moving images, installations and publications. She explores stories, memory, and embodied knowledge through forms of care, attention, and material engagement. In the summer of 2026 she visited the island of Buton in Sulawesi Province, Indonesia. For an extentive blog on the subject, written by Minsook Kang, click here.

A Language of the Hands - Embodied Knowledge and Transmitted Memory in Indonesian Buton Sarongs explores the Buton sarong as a form of embodied and transmitted knowledge.

Drawing on TRC collections and fieldwork in the town of Baubau, the exhibition traces how patterns, motifs, weaving practices, and memories that are  transmitted across generations through speech, observation, and the hands. As a strong oral tradition culture, the sarong emerges as a living textile language shaped by everyday life, nature, and generations of makers.

A Language of the Hands can be visited until 20th of November 2026. The TRC is open every weekday from 10.00 to 15.00.

On 31 August, the TRC opened its doors for a new exhibition: Paisley: The History of a Global Icon (by the curator, Augusta de Gunzbourg)

The new Paisley exhibition at the TRC. Photograph by the curator, Augusta de Gunzbourg.We all know the motif, that cone shape that is curved at the top, which is found on Kashmir shawls, men’s ties, 1970’s hippie prints, or even on cowboy bandanas. Paisley is everywhere !

It is so well-known that it is generally accepted as just being one of those patterns that have always been there, but we rarely think think about its origins and why it is so popular all over the world.

The TRC exhibition is a re-edited, expanded version of one of its past, and online exhibitions (interrupted by the COVID-pandemic) about the famous Paisley motif, and this time mounted in the TRC's new premises along the Boerhaavelaan (No.6) in Leiden.

The exhibition explores the history of the Paisley motif, its ancient origins and its development to the present day. It also looks at how it is currently used for a wide variety of textiles and garments all over the globe.

(Emilie Lambert, collection manager, TRC, 17 October 2026) The TRC houses over 300 pairs of gloves, mittens and gauntlets. They are made of leather, wool or silk, in lace or with net work. They may be knitted, and be practical or purely decorative. The sheer variety, both technically and culturally, is fascinating (Fig. 1). Some of the gloves are highlighted in previous blogs, such as one about Scottish examples, written by Hanke van Prooije in 2025.

Fig 1: Assortment of gloves in the TRC collection showing the wide variety in material, shape, and decoration.

Tokyo-based textile designer Hana Mitsui. Photograph: www.hanatextiledesign.com(Flora Kovacs-Wester, TRC Fellow, 12 October 2026) As part of my research into Japanese kasuri weaving (see my earlier TRC blog post), I recently had the opportunity to interview Japanese textile designer Hana Mitsui about her practice and her approach to traditional Japanese textiles.

Drawing on her experience with leading fashion and textile houses in Japan and internationally, Mitsui combines traditional weaving techniques with new approaches to materials, patterns and production. During our conversation, Mitsui generously offered to donate a selection of samples from her experiments with Kurume kasuri to the TRC. The donated samples make a meaningful addition to TRC’s existing collection of traditional kasuri textiles and enable us to expand the ways in which Kurume kasuri can be understood and researched within the TRC collection.

Mitsui’s ability to see new possibilities in fabric caught the attention of the fashion world early in her career. While studying at the Royal College of Art in London, Alexander McQueen selected her graduation textile for its Spring/Summer 2015 Paris collection.