It seems yesterday, however, almost a year has already passed since my experience at the ISKO Denim Seminar in Castelfranco Veneto and, having been awarded the winners at Neonyt Berlin last July, the time has come to talk about the seventh edition of the contest linked to the ISKO’s cultural and educational project, which involves students of fashion schools, their teachers and designers specialized in denim.
Presented last week at Neonyt Berlin, the seventh edition of ISKO-ISKOOL has the creative theme ‘North, East, South, West – connected by one planet’, a very current topic in which the exploration of the world, both locally and globally, goes hand in hand with attention to the product life cycle.
Designers will be working on their world’s citizenship, digging into their roots and approaching different cultures to define and track down the geography of the world connecting them through responsibility:
“No matter where we were born or where we live, one thing remains the same: we all share this planet. Being a designer today is not only about creating beautiful things, it also means being aware of the process as a whole, from sketching to manufacturing to marketing, taking responsibility of the product life cycle. We ask that you explore the world that surrounds you both locally and globally. This means drawing on your own origins and background and combining it with influences and ideas inspired by other cultures, style and ways of life to create your responsible denim.”
From this theme participants will be asked to develop a capsule collection according to their vision, including two outfits, each one featuring a 5-pocket jeans to interpret their view on the “local” concept and two Denim Show Pieces to reflect their worldwide influences and topics of interest.
Many schools are involved, from the Istituto Marangoni to the NABA in Milan to the Polimoda in Florence, from the Parsons in Paris to the Akademie Mode & Design in Munich to the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, just to name a few.
In the foreground, inside and outside the competition, the responsibility that ISKO faces with the R-TWO platform, that is a combination of recycled and reused materials which is based in particular on a mixture of reused cotton and recycled polyester, so as to deal with two main issues that apparel supply chains are currently faced with: driving raw materials efficiency and waste reduction.
