CULTURAL SUSTAINABILITY AND ARCHETYPE IN CREATIVE TEXTILE DESIGN MARLENA POP 1 , DORINA HORATAU 2 1 INCDTP - National Research Institute for Textile and Leather, Bucharest, Romania, pop_marlen@yahoo.ca 2 UNA, National Art University, Textile Department, Bucharest, Romania, h2dorina@yahoo.com Textile arts are some of the oldest cultural technologies of humanity, found in both the public and private space of life. Artistic and cultural imaginary, predominantly feminine, has found an ideal place of expression as the social and cultural praxis tradition has a millenary individuality and continuity. The poetics and narrative of textile arts have developed alongside technologies, over time however, they have lost their cultural value in favor of practical use, in which their fibrous structure and network-like system were exploited. Emotional design and arts-science have become increasingly attractive research directions in several interdisciplinary art programs based on the numerous novelties of science and technology, as well as on researching metaphor or visual semiotics. The paper presents artistic experiments in the creative textile design of a group of students in textile arts. Introduction The theories on the philosophy of the imaginary show that the real-symbolic-imaginary triad is used as a starting point in any cultural archetypal analysis, because these three elements represent the levels of the individual's relation to the world. For the analysis of literary and artistic imaginary, the research of imaginary has developed a number of analytical tools: mythocriticism, archetypology, imagology, methods that allow a hermeneutics of cultural imaginary from an immanent perspective that captures the irreducible specificity of image, symbol, myth, as mental functions that have a well-defined status. The archetype postulated by C. Jung as a mythical matrix of life has been replaced in the design practice by the paradigm of the model, the pattern, the concept for the development of any anthropogenic object. Through the Sustainability and Archetype in Creative Textile Design project, the transfer of a conceptual archetype of archaic