Renowned trend forecaster Li Edelkoort invited our Elaine Gold Launch Pad designers to her West Village townhouse last Wednesday. The purpose: a candlelit dinner coupled with a forward-facing, informative, thought-provoking and provocative conversation about the future of fashion.
“In the beginning of the new year, Steven Kolb passed around a hard copy of Li Edelkoort’s Anti-Fashion Manifesto, where a staff list was stapled onto the copy for everyone to initial once they finished reading it,” CFDA Director of Education and Professional Development Sara Kozlowski told the group.
Alexis Isabel, Emily Bode of Bode New York, Lucy Jones of Ffora, Ali Rose and Jack Burns of Genusee, and Jahnkoy’s Maria Kazakova gathered at the long wooden table for the family-style dinner by a fireplace.
“Instead of building walls, Li built a bigger table, a really big table,” Burns observed. “That table was a platform for inclusion and appreciation for all of the diversely individual perspectives that gathered around it. We are all so different in aesthetic, product and approach, yet we are all committed to creating a better fashion system, one that is better for people and the planet.”
The gathering was an opportunity to elaborate on the Anti-Fashion Manifesto, which aligns with the ethos of Elaine Gold Launch Pad, ie. supporting emerging talent, new thought-leadership and innovation.
At the dinner, Edelkoort, who is launching the first Textiles program at Parsons, advised the designers to focus on designing one’s business and making it their future while also extending care for others and furthering the togetherness of cultures.
”This new creative elite is going to lead another way of doing business including recycling, repurposing, bringing cultures together very much based on local production,” she said. “There is a great young, international, entrepreneurial, global spirit enabling the foundation, which is fantastic.”
The future of fashion will flourish through the authenticity of human relationships with energy driven by the people who create with purpose and meaning.
“A system cannot exist without the people who created it,” Kozlowski said. “We can only evolve if we authentically value relationships, find truth in those who inspire us and who we aspire to become.”
Accessories Council President Karen Giberson expressed her hopes that the dinner will serve as “a catalyst for this team to develop their projects in a different way, and certainly collaborate with each other. When you are going through the program, you are working on your project but the ability to network in a social manner and get to know each other better, I’m looking at people talking and they are becoming friends. There is a unity among the team that I don’t think will end when the program ends.”
