PALIMPSEST AWARD

The Palimpsest Award – Angewandte Collection and Archive x Modeklasse will be presented for the first time in 2026 as part of the Show of the Fashion Department at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

The award recognizes an outstanding graduation collection from the Fashion Department and combines artistic recognition with institutional visibility and collection-related sustainability.

The Palimpsest Award 2026 comprises prize money of €3,000 as well as an acquisition sum of €2,000. The total value of the award is therefore €5,000.

The first awarded position was selected by a joint jury from Collection and Archive and the Fashion Department. The jury consisted of: Cosima Rainer, Director Collection and Archive; Stefanie Kitzberger, Deputy Director Collection and Archive; Robert Müller, Curator, Collection and Archive; Craig Green, Professor of Fashion Design, Fashion Department; and Monica Titton, Senior Scientist, Fashion Department.

First Award Recipient
The first recipient of the Palimpsest Award 2026 is Felix Schmidt.

The jury honours Felix Schmidt’s graduation collection as a body of work that embodies precisely the qualities the Fashion Department and Collection and Archive wish to make visible and preserve for future generations: a joyful yet sophisticated vision of fashion that brings together technical precision, creative autonomy and conceptual depth.

His collection questions the fantasy of fashion itself: its promises of glamour, transformation, theatricality and campness, but also the fragility and ambiguity of these images. Through its combination of lightness and seriousness, opulence and reflection, humor and technical refinement, the work articulates a distinctive creative voice.

The jury understands Felix Schmidt’s collection not only as an outstanding graduation project, but as an artistic position that exemplifies how fashion today can be thought through materiality, physicality, performance, and cultural imagination.

The Fashion Department at the University of Applied Arts Vienna is an internationally renowned program in fashion design. It understands fashion as an independent creative and artistic practice: an exploration with silhouette, material, construction, and form, in which technical knowledge, experimental processes, conceptual precision, and social issues are closely interwoven.
Under the artistic direction of Craig Green, students explore the critical and creative potential of fashion between materiality, corporeality, and concept.
Graduation collections emerge from scholarly inquiry, material research, technical expertise, and an open, experimental design practice. They mark not only the completion of a course of study, but often the first clearly articulated appearance of an independent design position.

Collection and Archive understands itself as an active repository of knowledge. As an institution of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, it supports students, teachers, and researchers, develops international collaborations, and combines the continuous cataloguing and development of its holdings with their critical examination.
Founded in 1980 as a school collection, the institute forms an important interface between the university and the public through its diverse exhibition, teaching, and research activities.
The holdings of Collection and Archive document the history of the Angewandte from 1867 to the present, as well as the diverse networks of its protagonists.
The Fashion and Textile Collection includes numerous works by teachers, students, and their labels. One focus lies on positions at the intersections of fashion and art.

Against this background, the Palimpsest Award – Angewandte Collection and Archive x Modeklasse offers the opportunity not only to showcase outstanding final-year projects on a temporary basis, but also to situate them within a long-term institutional, collection-based and broader cultural-historical context.

The term palimpsest refers to a surface on which traces of earlier inscriptions remain, are overwritten, superimposed, and become legible once more.

For the Fashion Department, this notion is especially apt: every collection bears traces of research, the history of materials, an understanding of the body, craft-related decision, biographical references and social discourses. It is not merely a result, but a distillation of a process of thought and work.

The Palimpsest Award aims to recognize this multilayered quality. It supports students at a decisive transitional moment in their careers while also making visible that experimental fashion practice is an essential part of artistic and cultural production — a practice that should be collected, conserved, discussed, and inscribed into the history of the University of Applied Arts.

The Palimpsest award aims to promote outstanding achievements at the intersection of art and fashion, and to reach a wide public. It provides long-term support for the international activities of graduates from the University of Applied Arts Vienna and creates a significant social outreach. With this in mind, the award recognizes graduation collections not only as design achievements, but as artistic statements in their own right.

At its core is the conviction that fashion, in its most advanced form, is an artistic, cultural, and experimental practice — and that this practice deserves support, recognition, and institutional recognition.