ABSTRACT
For over 40 years, since the age of 16, I have been working with textiles. For the longest period I was a shirt manufacturer, with a final production of 10,000 high quality shirts a day. Later, I worked as a consultant for the textile and clothing industry and in 1986 I was appointed as the direction of the Textile Museum in The Netherlands. But in between I studied at university during the evenings. And so, at the age of 46 years, I graduated as a lawyer specializing in social-economic and business affairs. During the period I worked as a consultant, I also worked for a national institute for education where I assisted in making educational programmes for textiles schools. It is strange, but during the period that I worked in order to try to explain to other people what textiles mean, it was the period that I had the feeling that I learnt the most myself.
