Copenhagen Fashion Summit 2019 is set to present the Innovation Forum, a sustainable solutions platform designed to help small and large fashion businesses speed up or embark on their sustainable journey. Copenhagen Fashion Summit, hosted by Global Fashion Agenda, has established itself as the world’s leading business event on sustainability in fashion.
The curated trade and exhibition area, which features some of the world’s most promising sustainable solutions, also includes a pitch stage and pre-scheduled business meetings. New to the 2019 edition of Innovation Forum is Design Studio presented by Avery Dennison, an area inspired by creative directors for creative directors, and Future Lab, which will showcase some of the most progressive start-ups, according to a press release on the show.
Each of the solutions presented at Innovation Forum will address one or more of the priorities in the CEO Agenda 2019, which defines the top sustainability priorities for industry executives to take action on. The stands across Innovation Forum will be labelled with icons representing the CEO Agenda’s core and transformational priorities to aid in identifying how each solution can be strategically applied to your business to turn words into action.
At Innovation Forum, participating fashion brands will meet with more than 40 solution providers covering the entire value chain – from innovative materials to responsible packaging solutions and from new disruptive ideas to tried and tested, large-scale solutions. Through facilitated and pre-scheduled business meetings between fashion brands and solution providers, the matchmaking programme powered by the Ramboll Foundation will help companies take the first important steps towards (further) implementing sustainability. Each business meeting will be set up based on careful screening using data provided by participating fashion brands and solution providers.
Design and material choices affect not only style, but also the environmental impact of a product and ultimately how sustainable it is, making creative directors key decision makers in their companies. Educating, inspiring, and empowering creative directors and their design teams is, thus, essential in transforming fashion into a more responsible industry. To accelerate this required shift, Innovation Forum 2019 will present Design Studio in collaboration with Avery Dennison. Curated by creative directors for creative directors, Design Studio will showcase a responsible value chain from a designer’s perspective and present sustainable solutions across various key design challenges. Design Studio is developed with input from an advisory board comprising some of the industry’s leading creative minds like Prabal Gurung, designer at Prabal Gurung, Matthew Williams, creative director at Alyx, Peter Copping, independent fashion professional and former creative director at Oscar de la Renta and Charlotte Eskildsen, creative director at Designers Remix.
The continued development and emergence of new innovative solutions is required if we are to leverage our industry’s global performance. In partnership with two of the most significant players driving sustainable innovation in the fashion industry, Fashion for Good and H&M Foundation’s Global Change Award, Innovation Forum 2019 presents Future Lab. A curated space, Future Lab will highlight the ten most convincing innovators presenting technologies and business models that hold the potential to transform the fashion industry as we know it. The ten Future Lab innovators selected will talk about their solutions on the Summit’s Pitch Stage, presented by Eastman Naia, to share their stories with impact investors, business angels and CEOs from world-leading fashion brands. As the high point of Future Lab, the two best pitches will get the opportunity to present on the Summit’s main stage in front of 1,200 decision makers, with the Summit audience voting for the winner.Â
