This paper examines how heritage, innovation, and sustainability are negotiated between academic researchers and textile artisans in Hoa Tien, a Vietnamese craft village participating in the Vietnam Design Research Studio. The pilot study initially sought to co-create a digital platform to document local weaving practices. However, fieldwork revealed significant gaps between academic vocabularies of preservation, digital futures, and sustainable design, and the artisans’ tacit, embodied, and livelihood-oriented knowledge systems. Using participatory action research and ethnographic methods, the study shows how textile craft operates within fashion as a cultural, economic, and discursive system. Artisans framed their practice through ancestral motifs, intergenerational transmission, and economic pragmatism, while researchers emphasised documentation, innovation, and future-oriented sustainability. These divergent discourses exposed the limits of conventional co-design models that assume shared language, symmetrical knowledge, or common goals. The paper reframes co-creation as an adaptive, semiotic, and discursive process shaped by language, epistemology, and situated practice. By foregrounding these negotiations, it contributes to debates on how alternative fashion languages emerge from the margins and how they might inform more inclusive and context-sensitive approaches to sustainable fashion futures.