The British Textile Biennial (BTB) will celebrate the contribution of the materials made in Lancashire that clothed explorers on Mount Everest.

It comes on the 50th anniversary of the successful 1975 scaling of the southwest face of the world's tallest mountain.

In October 2025, the British Textile Biennial (BTB) will explore 'invention and innovation, past, present and future', through indigenous knowledge to space-age technology.

The Blackburn-based festival will journey from the earliest form of shelter, the tent, to space suits, and from plant-based dyes to the first polymers.

BTB25 looks back to see how the textile pioneers of 20th Century Lancashire were inspired by a bold vision of the future that revolutionised lives.

It will survey the stream of hi-tech fabrics created in the area in the early 20th Century, used for everything from airships to typewriter ribbons and high-performance tents, and chart the relationship between world inventors and science fiction.

For this edition, BTB25 also brings together artists who are working with indigenous people who hold the secrets of nature’s own innovations, from purple sea snails to cochineal beetles, that point to ways of healing the world we once sought to dominate.

As in previous years, BTB25 will present its exhibitions, installations and performances in former mills and other rarely accessible spaces created by the textile industry across the centuries.

Major artists will be given the opportunity to make new work on a grand scale, as Lubaina Himid, Christine Borland and Jasleen Kaur have done in the past.

In 2023 the exhibition featured 60 artists, 27 exhibitions across 18 indoor and 2 outdoor venues, and included talks, walks, tours, workshops, and other events with attendances of over 84,000.

The British Textile Biennial 2025 will take place from October 2 to November 2, 2025, in Blackburn.