The history of our museum.
On the history of the museum
Mennonite religious refugees founded the Krefeld silk industry in the 17th century.
With the support of Frederick the Great, it experienced its heyday in the 18th century and was able to survive on the free market in the 19th century. In 1880, they started to supplement the weaving and dyeing institutes with a textile teaching collection primarily meant to serve the next generation of designers.Forming the core of the current inventory of the German Textile Museum Krefeld, this collection has been augmented by many other items such as clothing, fabrics, tools like chemical devices, as well as sample books, catalogues, and fashion journals in the course of the next few decades.
The collection was started out as part of the Royal Weaving School’s teaching department, where it served as a source of inspiration for new textile designers.
It was important enough to eventually receive museum collection status in 1979/1980, when it was moved to a specially prepared museum. Since that time it has been known as the “German Textile Museum Krefeld”.
Located at the very heart of the beautiful old town of Linn, a suburb of Krefeld, the German Textile Museum Krefeld offers one of the most important international collections of historical textiles and clothing. The collection now comprises some 30,000 pieces from around the world, spanning all periods of history up to the present day.
Our textiles can only be exhibited temporarily for conservation reasons.
This is why the museum cannot offer any permanently accessible display collection.
In addition to changing exhibitions, which are made up of a major part of our exhibits, we also show exhibitions featuring contemporary themes of textile art such as “Asia Europe – Fiber Art”, which was conceived as an exhibition series.
Adults and children have the opportunity to take part in museum life in an active and creative way through the wide variety of workshops pertaining to the current exhibition or to current themes concerning textiles, processing, and colours.
Of course, the German Textile Museum not only contains the exhibition rooms but also administrative rooms and an archive for storage of its exhibits that is perfectly equipped according to conservation standards. The archive is not open to the public.
The museum also houses one of the largest reference libraries on the subject of textiles in Germany.