Profile: Freda Xia – Only Natural Design Competitions

Freda Xia

Parsons School of Design

Freda Xia is an interdisciplinary textile designer based in New York, currently pursuing an MFA in Textiles at Parsons School of Design. With a background in both fine arts and fashion design, her practice moves across garment construction, biomaterials, and soft systems, developing textile structures shaped by gravity, tension, and time. Her work is process-led and material-driven, exploring how form emerges through material behavior rather than predetermined design. Working with hand-reeled silk, wool, and protein-based biomaterials, she investigates how softness behaves on the body and how materials stretch, sag, and reorganize in response to pressure, movement, and environmental conditions. Rooted in traditional textile techniques such as weaving, knitting, and bobbin lace structures, her practice builds on inherited material knowledge while extending it through experimentation and biomaterial development. Xia’s work moves between wearable, spatial, and installation formats, often occupying the scale of the body while extending into surrounding space. Through these shifting formats, she treats fashion not as a fixed object but as a responsive system between body, material, and environment. Her work has been exhibited in New York, including New York Textile Month and the Textile Study Group of New York, and her thesis collection was selected for the Parsons Benefit showcase and featured on the Parsons official website. Through an ongoing focus on material testing and process-based making, Xia’s practice proposes alternative approaches to textile production, exploring how natural fibers and protein-based materials can adapt, repair, and return to natural systems, while maintaining sensitivity to touch, time, and transformation.

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Negotiated Skin

Category: Apparel

Competitions: Fashion Competition 2026

Negotiated Skin is an ongoing bio-based textile project that develops wearable biomaterial membranes as alternatives to petroleum-based plastics, synthetic organza, and non-degradable transparent films commonly used in fashion. For this submission, I am entering one wearable biomaterial membrane look from the Negotiated Skin series. Images with installation views or multiple bodies are included to show scale, movement, and body activation, not as separate submitted looks. The work combines protein-based biomaterials, hand-reeled raw silk, wool, fruit waste transfer, natural plant fibers and natural dyes. Through repeated material testing and crosslinking processes, I develop soft membranes that can hold form while remaining flexible, responsive, and body-activated. The project begins from an experience of bodily rupture and moves toward repair. Healing is not only a concept in the work, but also a material action. The membranes stretch, soften, collapse, and return, moving between skin, garment, and installation. Instead of creating a single finished fabric, Negotiated Skin proposes a bio-based material system that can be worn, activated, repaired, and considered within natural cycles. The project investigates how fashion can move beyond the surface and become a process of care, transformation, and ecological return.