Christoph Hefti

Textile designer and artist Christoph Hefti, born in Switzerland, divides his time between Brussels, Paris and Zurich. After studying textile design in Zurich and fashion at Central Saint Martins in London, he started designing for Jean-Paul Gaultier in Paris and Dries Van Noten in Antwerp. For the latter he spent 13 years as a creative assistant and was responsible for the printed fabrics, including research, design and development. After leaving Antwerp behind, Hefti started working on a freelance basis for various fashion houses including Lanvin and Balenciaga in Paris and Acne Studios in Stockholm. He is currently designing fabrics for Mugler in Paris.

Parallel to his career in fashion, Christoph Hefti creates video installations that are shown in art spaces all over Europe. In collaboration with other artists, he is also active in the field of the performing arts, where he combines music, costume design, video and live art. Hefti interweaves all these media seemingly effortlessly in a whole, consistent, creative universe.

Christoph Hefti is highly esteemed as a member of juries for competitions in Switzerland and abroad. He himself has been awarded several Swiss Design Awards. In 2009 he won the ‘Grand Prix Design’ for his multidisciplinary oeuvre.

Christoph Hefti’s love for crafted textiles has taken him to Nepal, where he designs and develops his own series of hand-knotted rugs. During his visits to Nepal, Christoph rediscovered the direct interaction between the designer and the craftsman and became fascinated by the use of traditional crafts in a contemporary context. He approaches the mystical and even spiritual tradition of storytelling textiles through his very personal yet worldly themes.

Christoph Hefti’s most recent projects include a tiled floor for the entrance of Ghent’s Arts Centre Vooruit, a textile wallpaper for Maison Dandoy’s flagship store in the Galeries de la Reine, a set design including a printed curtain for a performance by Diederik Peeters and printed fabrics for Swiss fashion designer Julian Ziegerli.

Recent exhibitions of Christoph Hefti include ‘1+1+1’ together with Johanna Grawunder and Antoni Malinowski at Assab One in Milano, 2018; ‘Soft? Tactile Dialogues’ at the MoMu in Antwerp, 2018; ‘The Paint We Wear’ curated by Gert Voorjans at Joyce, Hong Kong, 2019; ‘Textiles Revealed’ at Unix Gallery during New York Textile Month, 2019 and ‘Maske’ at Aargauer Kunsthaus, 2019. Hefti’s carpets have been shown in 2020 in the solo show ‘…where?…there! …where?’ at Dries Van Noten’s Little House in Los Angeles and in the group exhibitions ‘Extraordinaire!’ at Mudac in Lausanne and ‘Énergie animale’ at the Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich. For the latter, he co-curated the exhibition ‘Wild Thing – Modeszene Schweiz’ the same year. In 2021, Christoph Hefti developed a hand-painted wallpaper produced by Atelier d’Offard for Brussels’ Horta Museum on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Pushing Back The Walls’ and a scenography for the baroque music festival MA in Bruges.

The work of Christoph Hefti is part of the collections of the Swiss National Museum and Museum für Gestaltung Zürich. Furthermore, many of his carpets are acquired by private collectors in Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, France, the Netherlands, the US and China.