As someone who has lived in Milan for seven years, where all you really get from the fashion industry is trends and spectacle, it is really refreshing to come across perspectives that go far beyond trends and societal expectations. The State of Fashion Biennale 2026 in Arnhem shows how it is possible to work within this industry with a critical eye and come up with alternatives that involve the people and areas that so often remain out of the spotlight.

While most of us are aware of the impact of the fashion industry on the environment and on people's living conditions, it is sometimes very difficult to imagine a different way of making fashion without waste, pollution and exploitation. These alternative approaches include looking at other, non-Western traditions and materials, and embracing differences as a source of knowledge.

While collaborating with several countries around the world and providing a platform for international artists, the Biennale manages to maintain a connection with the local, Dutch art and fashion scene: this is particularly evident in Stadhuisplein and in The Entrepreneurial Lab, where the former exhibits graduation projects by students from ArtEz's Bachelor of Fashion Design programme and the latter presents a project realised in collaboration with the local community.

Taking Arnhem as its starting point, the Biennale broadens its horizons to encompass all possible ways of making fashion, offering audiences a sense of hope in these uncertain times.

Redefining the promises

The State of Fashion Biennale 2026 in Arnhem, open from 14 May to 28 June, articulates its principles in the title Available to Promise: Hidden Systems, Shared Futures. The Biennale's programme, which has its base and roots in Arnhem, opens the door to the world and asks a fundamental question: what is fashion really?

We are used to thinking about the final product, but we usually ignore the processes these objects went through before they reached our shops, and also where they end up when they are broken, too small or out of fashion. The State of Fashion Biennale aims to give the public an overall view of fashion as a process, reflecting on who bears the consequences of this industry and what might change in the future. This is its main strength, the implicit hope we already see in the title ‘Available to Promise’, meaning that these promises can be reshaped and revised.

I attended the opening of the State of Fashion Biennale 2026 on 13 May and had the chance to get a sneak preview of the various venues where the Biennale will take place from 14 May: the Eusebius Church, Rozet, the outdoor pavilion on Stadhuisplein, Museum Arnhem and The Entrepreneurial Lab.

Fashion-related projects will be presented at these five venues, alternately highlighting the local dimension and the whole world, linking Arnhem with various foreign partners through a series of integrated research projects in Sri Lanka, China and Ghana. The international dimension of the Biennale shows how the fashion industry is globally interconnected, with these connections extending even to non-human worlds.

Eusebius church: an exhibition on the future of the fashion industry

Built around five interlinked pillars - Develop, Distribute, Hype, Experience, Transform - the Biennale reveals the hidden aspects of fashion production, while maintaining a productive tension with what is actually on display: this is particularly evident in the main exhibition at the Eusebius Church, where one can encounter fabrics, hands, stories and the final product, alongside an ironic look at fashion trends.

After visiting two other venues, Stadhuisplein and Het OndernemersLab, where the local dimension of the Biennale becomes clear, the exhibition in the Eusebius Church fully embraces the international scope of the Biennale; a paradox, given that the exhibition is in the main city church. Yet the church itself becomes the gateway to a revelation of how the fashion industry works and how many different people and places are involved.

This setting, which is both fascinating and challenging as the curators noted, houses the most complex part of the Biennale's curation, bringing together very diverse artworks, from fine art to fashion design. In this church, the three curators, Anouchka van Driel, Shanu Walpita and Anne Zhou, explained their vision of fashion as a collaborative process involving multiple interconnected actors. When walking into the church, this interconnectedness becomes increasingly clear: from the entrance to the back part, where there is an impressive organ, visitors pass through all the different stages of the fashion industry, from production to disruption.

The first part of the exhibition, titled ‘Develop’, highlights the process behind textile production, with an emphasis on workers‘ rights and the exploitative conditions they are exposed to: this is most aptly seen in Wang Bing's ’Young (Spring)‘, an installation that juxtaposes neatly cleaned, unworn new clothes with video footage of migrant textile workers. But there is also room for hope: ’Human Touch', a German conceptual fashion brand combining art and activism, invents alternative ways of working within the industry. The same mechanism of criticism combined with possible solutions is repeated in the subsequent pillars.

Under Hype, Charlotte Maeva Perret's The Riot Collection offers an explicit critique of fashion in digital circulation, questioning the relationship between logos and identity: the work mimics branded items by scouring the internet for iconic fashion images and printing them on an original collection, inventing the concept of “fashion piracy”.

The exhibition concludes with the Transform pillar, which challenges the current ‘death’ of clothing and attempts to imagine different futures for clothing. Liquid Bodies by Rosie Broadhead, a designer and researcher specialising in eco-materials, outlines a vision of new textiles that are beneficial to both humans and the environment, transforming fabric into an interface between the body and the world around it, from a more-than-human perspective.

What struck me most after the visit was the sense of freshness the exhibition exudes through its curatorial choices. And above all, a hope for future change in the fashion industry.

Beyond the Label: Fashion unravelled at the 2026 State of Fashion Biennale

Reimagining the promises

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