Fashion Open Studio Berlin - Product and Purpose

Fashion Open Studio Berlin - Product and Purpose A wide-ranging programme of workshops, installations, film and an exhibition trail at Berlin Fashion Week March 2022

Fashion Open Studio takes residence at Berlin Fashion Week March 15-17 with a series of designer open studios, short films, exhibitions and talks featuring an innovative cohort of local and international designers. This ongoing programme, now in its third season at Berlin Fashion Week, is designed to change the way we think about our clothes, and to highlight real solutions in practice. Fashion Open Studio invites you to meet the designers, understand their work, and creates a space for dialogue and an exchange of ideas and information.

The programme highlights 15 designers who each bring their own approach and solutions to a range of challenges facing the fashion industry. Fashion Open Studio introduces these designers as pioneers in their fields, and role models for the wider industry. The Exhibition: Product & Purpose examines different approaches to creating fashion, exploring the process as well as highlighting the all-important sense of purpose that motivates the designers. The showcasing designers take the audience inside the seams of the garment to better understand how clothes are made as well as why these designers are rejecting the industry’s bad habits and toxic culture. The Exhibition: Product & Purpose takes place across three locations at 202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit, Pool Berlin and Superconscious Store.

 

A programme of workshops and events demonstrates how clothes can be made using only renewable resources, in ways that are local, create and nurture community, promote wellbeing and positivity, and embrace new business models that put people and the planet before profits. Visitors will also be able to take part in interactive workshops and installations with Become A-Ware Studio’s live event ‘inundated with clothes’, in-person Open Studios with Berlin-based designers Anekdot, Anima Protection and CHURCH OF THE HAND

Fashion Open Studio has commissioned a series of short films made by Sabrina Hubert featuring the behind the scenes worlds of Anima Protection, Become A-Ware, Melisa Minca, Vladimir Karaleev, which will be launched online during MBFW at mbfw.berlin To dig deeper into some of the issues being tackled by the designers, there are three open and frank discussions tied to the theme for Fashion Revolution Week 2022: Money Fashion Power which explore repairs and restoration, how we value our clothes, and who is in control.

This programme is supported by the Berlin Senate. Stephan Schwarz, Senator for Economic Affairs, Energy and Operations said: "After only 3 seasons, the potential of Fashion Open Studio can already be seen. I am very happy that we were able to win this international format from Fashion Revolution for Berlin Fashion Week. Here, the personal exchange takes place in the open studios, but also the involvement of the specialised trade in an unconventional way."

Orsola de Castro, creative director and co-founder of Fashion Revolution said: “It is always inspiring to have the opportunity to have a conversation with committed and innovative designers, even more so to facilitate them in showing their work, and their solutions. At Fashion Open Studio we are proud to be in such a privileged position, and to have such an amazing cohort of designers in our midst.”

Designers participating in Fashion Open Studio during Berlin Fashion Week:

• AMESH explores Amesh Wijesekera’s love for handmade textiles. Each AMESH piece is individuallyhand-spun, hand-knitted, or hand-printed using deadstock textiles and trims carefully salvaged from SriLanka’s street markets and industrial waste.
• Anekdot transforms exceptional surplus materials into sensual no-waste lingerie, swimwear andloungewear. Designed in Berlin. Manufactured with care. Anekdot
• Anima Protection creates deconstructed up-cycled fashion. The Berlin based brand challenges thestatus-quo, merging the boundaries between fashion and art, ANIMA PROTECTION supports socialcritiques.
• Become A-Ware is a Berlin based brand which transforms returns and overhangs intended for disposalinto items of clothing that shine with design and awareness.
• Catalogue of Disguise creates a shared experience that moves beyond the traditional show setting.Based in Berlin, the series adopts an intersectional approach to shape a cultural perception of fashion.
• CHURCH OF THE HAND creates immersive encounters in the realm of sustainable fashion. Each piecemade from deadstock, upcycled materials or organics holds its very own unique story.
• Emeka was founded by Sydney Emeka Nwakanma as a circular lifestyle brand that creates clothingfrom upcycled fabrics in rural Kenya. The Berlin-based brand employs local tailors to create uniquepieces of clothing that respect the African textile tradition.
• Ivy & Oak was founded in 2016 by Caroline Gentz. They are committed to contemporary, sustainableand long-lasting aesthetics. Individual style, instead of trend. Doing things differently, questioning theindustry and consumer behaviour.
• Joao Maraschin, a brand that supports and preserves hand made techniques like crochet andembroidery and celebrates an inclusive approach to its craftspeople and creative practitioners.
• Melisa Minca weaves a degree in politics and sustainable development with a genuine love for fashionand a deep frustration with the industry. By continuously incorporating circularity and locality intoproduction, she crafts truly unique and sustainable pieces that upset stereotypes, expectations, and abroken supply chain.
• Patrick McDowell works with a collection of brand partners annually, offering circular solutions thatcentre systemic change and education to create meaningful lasting change through ‘Reimagine’collections that save and monetise deadstock fabrics and clothing. Patrick is based in London.
• Rafael Kouto is an avant-garde, experimental and conceptual fashion brand with integrity and purposeestablished in 2017. The Swiss-based brand is characterised by a distinctive, visionary aestheticmerging the African and Western culture.
• Renata Brenha is a London-based Brazilian womenswear designer. She stands as a Latin Americanfemale voice in the context of contemporary fashion, researching artisanal techniques and intuitivemethods to regain the human aspect in design, with the largely mixed Latin America culture definingboth her aesthetics and approach.
• Studio.fbx is a digital fashion design studio that aims to conserve physical resources to improve thetextile cycle. The Berlin-based studio envisions transforming the fashion industry from a linear to acircular economy by taking advantage of virtual fashion technologies.
• Vladimir Karaleev is a contemporary design brand based in Berlin defining clothing throughexperimental incisions and innovative shapes. Vladimir’s garments are produced and sourced locally ina small range of made-to-order series, working with stock or end-of-roll fabric and no overproduction.

About Fashion Open Studio
Now in its fifth year, Fashion Open Studio is a Fashion Revolution initiative working with designers and services to challenge the mainstream and champion the radicals. With an annual programme of workshops, studio visits, peer to peer exchanges and technical demonstrations, as well as bespoke mentoring, and fashion week interventions, Fashion Open Studio has created a unique ecosystem of designers around the world who are connected by the desire to challenge the entire fashion system, from organic cotton seed to repair station. Fashion Open Studio highlights radical new ideas and solutions to the systemic challenges facing the industry in accessible ways that stimulate questions and discussion and promote new business models.

About Fashion Revolution
Fashion Revolution is the world’s largest fashion activism movement, formed after the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh in 2013 which killed over 1,100 people. Fashion Revolution campaigns for a clean, safe, fair, transparent and accountable fashion industry through research, education, collaboration, mobilisation and advocating for policy change.

Fashion Revolution is a global movement with country offices and voluntary teams in 90 countries. Fashion Revolution believes in a global fashion industry that conserves and restores the environment and values people over growth and profit. In order to achieve this goal, the organisation conducts research that shines a light on the fashion industry’s practices and impacts, highlights where brands and retailers are moving too slowly and incentivises and promotes transparency and accountability across the supply chain.

Berlin Senate
The Berlin Senate Department for Economics, Energy and Enterprises (SenWiEnBe) is one of ten departments of the Berlin Senate and the supreme state authority responsible for economic and energy policy in the German capital - it is the state's economy and energy ministry.

Since 2007, the Berlin Senate Department for Economics, Energy and Operations has contributed well over 15 million euros in additional support to the development of the fashion industry at the location. To mitigate the effects of the pandemic in the fashion sector, around 5 million euros have been made available since 2020 alone, including 3.5 million euros in 2021 for the realignment of Berlin Fashion Week. In addition to start-up funding for platforms, the focus is on presentation opportunities for the fashion weeks in Berlin and Paris, as well as support for fashion labels through workshops and coaching services to further digitise business processes.

202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit
A cross-disciplinary platform, where avant-garde creatives meet industry stakeholders for constructive critical debates on the future of fashion. The aim is to bridge the gap between existing sustainability innovations and solutions with the industry’s need for pragmatic transformation guidelines and to envision tangible new alliances for new value chains for a sustainability-trendsetting future of fashion.

The upcoming 202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit will be broadcasted digitally and take place as a hybrid in-person event for a small audience in Berlin from 15-17 March 2022.

MBFW
The bi-annual event Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Berlin staged by NOWADAYS is Germany’s most successful fashion show format.

POOL
Rune Orloff and Kristian Rix, two Danes living in Berlin, are opening their first POOL showroom for men and launching a subscription service that cleverly makes high-end fashion consumption truly sustainable.

Superconscious
The new Superconscious store in Berlin Mitte is an experience lab underlining the transitions between contemporary fashion, high fashion and streetwear.