British footwear designer triumphs at ITS Contest

At the weekend designers from around the world descended on Trieste in Italy for the 15th edition of the annual International Talent Support contest, which celebrates emerging talent across fashion, accessories, art and jewellery, and the Royal College of Art dominated the awards, winning the ITS Accessories, the OTB Award, ITS Jewellery, and the Vogue Talents awards.

Each year proceedings are dominated with finalists who study fashion in the UK, with ITS claiming close to 90 percent of portfolios it receives come from UK-based designers, and this year seemed to be extremely strong for the Royal College of Art and the London College of Fashion, both schools producing a high number of finalists in the fashion, accessories and jewellery categories.

One of the big winners on the night was the Royal College of Art’s Helen Kirkum. The footwear designer’s collection of trainers ‘Our Public Youth’ captured the juries attention with her sustainable and time-consuming concept that takes discarded trainers and rebuilds new sneakers out of old parts using a collage technique.

Kirkum won the ITS Accessories Award, which includes a 10,000 euro cash prize, as well as the Vogue Talents Award, which will see the designer’s pieces featured on the Vogue Talents website and in the Vogue Italia supplement.

This isn’t the first accolades that the young designer has won, in 2014, she was awarded with the Worshipful Company of Cordwainers Footwear Student of the Year honour, and the designer was selected as the overall winner of the Adidas Forum Trainer Re-imagined project and offered an internship with Adidas in Germany, which she starts this summer.

“I still can’t believe that I am the winner, it’s been amazing, so much support,” said Kirkum after the awards. “It was also so great to see so many other Royal College of Art winners as we’ve become a family, all supporting each others work.”

Royal College of Art dominates ITS Contest awards

Other Royal College of Art winner’s included Danish menswear designer Niels Gundtoft Hansen, who was awarded the OTB Award, winning 5,000 euros and the possibility of an internship in one of the group’s brands. He won the award alongside designer Anna Bornholm, who last year won the Prix Chloé at the Hyères Festival, as OTB president Renzo Rosso, who presented the award on the night, stated that he loved both collections so much that he couldn’t decide between the two.

While the ITS Jewellery award was presented to German Sari Rathel for her Gender Blender collection of jewellery that allows deconstruction of gender roles by allowing the wearer to edit how to wear the pieces dependent on their identity. Her collection also recently received the Best Work in Jewellery award at the annual Royal College of Art awards. Rathel takes home 10,000 euros for her ITS win.

While London College of Fashion graduate Slovenian Jana Zornik picked up the Swatch Prize in the Artwork section for her Utopian vision that a free place is “where we can make our own rules and be whoever we wanna be”. Her Little Marta collection of mechanised grooming collectables was also presented as one of the finalists in the accessories category. Zornik wins 10,000 euros plus a six-month paid internship at the Swatch LAB in Zurich.

Mayako Kano wins fashion design competition in Trieste

The main ITS Fashion Award was won by New Zealander Mayako Kano for her ‘Reverse Fade’ collection inspired by the concept of being caught in limbo between “old” and “new” worlds represented by two layers that are in a “state of deconstruction”. Kano studied fashion design at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, followed by a masters in Fashion Design and Society at the Parsons School of Design in New York.

Other awards’s on the night included the YKK sponsored Accessories Award that went to Korean Young Jin Jang, while the Swarovski Award was presented to Tatiana Lobanova, and Italian artist Marco Baitella won 10,000 euros as the ITS Artwork winner. There was also a second win for Anna Bornhold, the German designer was awarded the Modateca Deanna Award, receiving 3,000 euros plus a 4-week Creative Knitwear Master Course, for her Kiss A Frog But Only With Brushed Teeth collection of denim and knitwear.

British milliner Justin Smith, who was an ITS Contest finalist in 2007, was awarded the Generali Future Award, an accolade that aims to support creativity and talent, while also building synergies to “drive innovation, competitiveness and growth”. Generali stated that Smith “perfectly embodies the spirit” of the award for his “ever-evolving entrepreneurial spirit”. Smith is best known for creating millinery for Angelina Jolie in Maleficent, as well as hats for principals in The Man from U.N.C.L.E film. As part of the honour, Smith will present a collection with Generali at next year’s ITS Contest.

The International Talent Support contest was founded in 2002 by Barbara Franchin, to support and celebrate young designers, as a way to give them much needed recognition and exposure to launch their careers. Each year the competition is held in the Northern Italian city of Trieste.

“For 15 years, thousands of young talents have been sharing with us their creativity from all over the world,” said Franchin, International Talent Support founder and director. “Since the beginning, we deeply understood the profound meaning of what we were receiving. We weren’t just dealing with projects, we were holding in our hand's seeds of pure creativity.”

Images: courtesy of International Talent Support