CNMI Details Milan Awards, Fashion Week, Three New Bicester Finalists
NEW YORK — For Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana, sustainability is a central play.
The Italian fashion chamber convened, once again, in New York City at the Casa Cipriani in South Street to kick off the sixth edition of its sustainable fashion awards in Milan. The awards ceremony is set for Sept. 24 at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, at the close of Milan Fashion Week. There are 10 awards in all, including The Bicester Collection Award for Emerging Designers and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation award for circular economy.
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At the luncheon, CNMI chairman Carlo Capasa announced the three finalists for The Bicester Collection Award for Emerging Designers, which includes recycled jewelry from So-Le Studio (headed by Maria Sole Ferragamo); ethical handwoven luxury from Made for a Woman (headed by Eileen Akbaraly); and multicultural infusions from British label Ahluwalia (headed by Priya Ahluwalia, who imbues her Indian and Nigerian roots in her colorful ready-to-wear lines).
“Sustainability can be glamorous, too,” Capasa stressed in a conversation ahead of the luncheon. For Capasa, every strategic decision made at CNMI is meant to be “impactful” — be it shortening a routine event here in order to sanction more bandwidth for new designers (even, tentatively, adding a day to the Milan Fashion Week calendar).
“We have a strong fashion week in September. We have to organize everything and the time for planning is very short, but I can promise you that you will be very surprised at the fashion week that we are preparing and for the sustainable fashion awards,” he said.
CNMI’s gains in propelling the Italian fashion industry forward will also be celebrated, including its work with the ESG due diligence framework (which CNMI said 93 percent of its members currently utilize). The framework was created in collaboration with the Ethical Fashion Initiative. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, and data partner Quantis, are other close collaborators in this year’s competition helping to narrow down a pool of 150 nominations. The firms are part of CNMI’s advisory committee, composed of 25 Italian and international associations and nonprofits.
For each award category, the three nominees that score the highest in the evaluation phase are brought to the jurors to decide the winner. Once again, the jury will be chaired by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, represented by the organization’s chief executive officer Andrew Morlet.
In pre-recorded videos at the luncheon, Desirée Bollier, chair and global chief merchant for Value Retail Management, and Jules Lennon, fashion lead at Ellen MacArthur Foundation, highlighted the importance of the awards.
Lennon said, “In our role as chair of the jury, we can bring an important circular economy lens to these awards and recognize the work of organizations embedding circular economy principles into the heart of their business…The question is not whether a circular economy for fashion is possible but what we can do together to make it happen.”
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