Swedish Textiles: Borås, Design Education and the Reinvention of a Manufacturing Region

For more than a century the town of Borås, east of Gothenburg, lived by cloth: woven at home on farm looms, carried across the country by travelling pedlars, then spun and woven in brick mills along the river Viskan. When that industry collapsed in the second half of the twentieth century, Borås did something instructive with what was left. It turned its weaving school, its factory buildings and its memory of the trade into a centre for textile education and research. That story, of Swedish textiles moving from the mill floor to the design studio and the laboratory, is the reason Borås has a day of its own on our Scandinavian design tour through Denmark, Sweden and Finland.

Why Borås matters to Swedish textiles

Borås is not a grand city, and that is part of the point. Its importance to Swedish textiles comes from the way a whole district organised itself around cloth over several centuries, and then had to work out what to do when the factories closed. The region around the town, known as Sjuhärad, combined three things that rarely sit together so neatly: a long tradition of rural weaving, a concentration of industrial mills, and a school founded specifically to train people for the trade.

The town itself was founded in 1621 under King Gustav II Adolf, and it marked its 400th anniversary in 2021. What follows traces how a manufacturing region, rather than its consumer fashion, reinvented itself through education.

From farm looms and pedlars to the mill town

Long before there were factories, the countryside around Borås was weaving. In the neighbouring district of Mark, the local museum records that many farmers switched from wool to flax and linen in the eighteenth century, and that home weaving became a vital income for landless crofters. In the early nineteenth century cotton took over. Production of cotton cloth in Mark rose fivefold between 1830 and 1844, and most of it was still woven by hand in people’s homes.

The work was organised through what historians call the putting-out system. Wealthier farmers, known as cloth agents, bought the raw material, gave it to neighbours to spin and weave, and paid for the finished cloth. According to the Mark museum, the district had 50 such agents in 1830, employing about 4,000 adults and many children between them. The cloth then travelled with the knallar, the pedlars of the region, who carried it across Sweden and into Norway on journeys that could last several months. Their number grew considerably in the early nineteenth century.

Mechanisation followed. In 1834 Sven Erikson founded a weaving mill at Rydboholm beside the Viskan, south-west of Borås, a mill the Mark museum describes as Sweden’s first mechanised cotton weaving mill. Production began in December 1835 with 25 looms. A cotton spinning mill at Rydal followed in 1853, built of local boulder stone and powered by the river. Over the following decades factories took over from the home weavers, and many families moved from crofts into mill work.

Borås grew with the mills. The University of Borås gives the town’s population as about 3,000 in 1860 and about 30,000 in 1920, a tenfold rise in sixty years driven by textile production. Spinning, weaving, knitting, dyeing and the making of ready-made clothing all became part of the local economy, and the town became one of the main centres of the Swedish textile industry.

A weaving school for an industrial town

The school that the tour visits began in 1866, when the Borås Technical Weaving School opened with a course in jacquard weaving, held in an annex of the town’s Technical Elementary School. The timing mattered. The jacquard loom, which used chains of punched cards to control complex woven patterns, was among the most demanding technologies of the trade. Joseph Marie Jacquard’s punched-card mechanism, introduced in 1804–05, transformed pattern weaving, and our overview of how textiles shaped human history sets it in the longer story of the loom. A town that wanted to compete in patterned cloth needed people who understood it.

The school grew alongside the industry. It moved into a purpose-built building in 1877. In 1894 it added machine operation, with teaching split between a two-year course for men and a one-year course for women in artistic weaving and cottage industries. A Technical Textiles Department, training engineers for the textile industry, opened in 1929, and in 1936 the Textile Institute was inaugurated. The weaving school joined the institute in 1948. In 1982 the institute was nationalised and became a department of the University of Borås, and in 1996 the department took the name it carries today, the Swedish School of Textiles.

What stands out in that timeline is continuity. The school was founded to serve local mills, and at every stage it adapted to what the industry needed next: hand skills, then machine operation, then engineering, then design. That habit of adapting would prove decisive when the mills themselves began to disappear.

Crisis and reinvention

From the middle of the twentieth century, Swedish textile manufacturing faced competition it could not match on cost. The Textile Museum of Sweden in Borås describes a rapid decline of the industry in the 1960s, and the University of Borås puts the losses from the textile crisis at 25,000 jobs. Mills closed across Sjuhärad. Some design and clothing firms kept going by having their products made abroad, and the University of Borås notes that this helped the town become the country’s mail-order capital.

The response that matters most for a design-minded visitor came from education and memory. The Textile Museum was founded by people in Borås who wanted to preserve the history of the Swedish textile and ready-made clothing industries as those industries vanished. The school, meanwhile, moved into the buildings the industry left behind. In 1989 its textiles department moved into the former premises of the Borås clothing firm Algot’s. In 2003 the Smart Textiles initiative was established at the school, and in 2010 the school gained the right to award doctoral degrees, both in general research and in artistic research, the kind of research carried out through design practice.

In 2013 the Swedish School of Textiles moved again, into the former factory of Svenskt Konstsilke, a firm that had made rayon, the early artificial silk. Together with the Textile Museum of Sweden, which also moved into the complex, the building became the Textile Fashion Center, in the old industrial district of Simonsland in the centre of Borås. The district once held weaving, spinning, sewing and dyeing works. It brings together education, research, businesses and culture connected to textiles and fashion, and the Smart Textiles Showroom and the Navet science centre share the site.

What the Swedish School of Textiles does

The school teaches across what it calls the whole textile value chain: textile and fashion design, textile technology and textile management. Its research ranges from fibres and recycling to design and artificial intelligence, and it describes its machine park and laboratories as places where students, researchers and companies work together. In 2018 the Swedish government gave the University of Borås the task of leading Textile & Fashion 2030, a national platform for sustainable fashion and textiles.

For a visitor, the interest lies in seeing a manufacturing tradition carried on in a new form. Its workshops serve teaching and experiment rather than mass production, and the questions being asked, about recycling, durability and new materials, are the questions facing the whole industry. Student work also travels. In April 2025 new uniforms for the guides at United Nations Headquarters in New York, designed by students at the school, were launched there.

The Borås day on the tour

Gothenburg’s own design collections, including the design, fashion and applied arts of the Röhsska Museum, are covered in our guide to Gothenburg’s Röhsska Museum.

Day eleven is the textile day. As the itinerary describes it, the group drives to Borås, approximately an hour, to visit the Swedish School of Textiles. The group then returns to the hotel in Gothenburg in the afternoon, with free time to rest before dinner at the hotel that evening. After breakfast on day twelve the route continues by train, a journey of approximately three hours, to Växjö in Småland, where Sweden’s glass tradition takes over, and our article on Kosta Boda and the glassworks of Småland picks up that part of the journey.

How long is the drive from Gothenburg to Borås on the tour?

The tour itinerary gives the drive as approximately an hour. The group leaves from the Gothenburg hotel, visits the Swedish School of Textiles in Borås and is back at the hotel in the afternoon. Dinner that evening is at the hotel and is included.

Is the visit to the Swedish School of Textiles included?

Yes. The visit is part of the day-eleven itinerary, and the tour includes all excursions, entrance fees and local guides. The tour page does not list a separate visit to the Textile Museum of Sweden, so if you hope to see the museum as well, ask a Tour Specialist before you travel, and check the museum’s official website for its opening hours.

How much walking does the Borås day involve?

The tour page does not give a separate walking figure for Borås. The whole tour is graded Level 2 (Moderate): travellers should be able to carry their own luggage, climb and descend stairs, and take part in three to five hours of physical activity a day, equivalent to walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven ground. If you have questions about a particular day, a Tour Specialist can talk them through with you.

How do Swedish textiles in Borås differ from Danish textile design?

Borås represents textiles as an industry and a field of study, with its roots in rural weaving and nineteenth-century mills. The Danish side of the tour shows textiles from another angle. On day five in Copenhagen the group visits the showroom of the Danish textile manufacturer Kvadrat, a firm whose fabrics are designed for architecture and interiors, a story told in our article on Kvadrat’s textiles for architecture and interiors. Seeing both a week apart shows the difference between a design-led manufacturer and a region that rebuilt itself around education and research.

Borås in the wider Swedish story

Textiles are one strand among many in Sweden’s history, and our introduction to Sweden’s history and culture, which includes a short section on Borås, places the town in the longer national story. For practical matters such as language and money, our answers to common questions about Sweden are a useful companion before you travel.

Borås rewards travellers who like to understand how places change. The farm looms, the pedlars’ routes and the river mills explain why the town exists; the school and the converted factories show what it chose to become. A day spent there sits naturally between Gothenburg’s museums and Småland’s glassworks, and it adds a chapter to Scandinavian design that is easy to miss: the people and institutions that keep a material tradition alive after the factories have gone quiet. Our guide to Scandinavian design across three countries sets Borås within the wider route.