Finalists Announced for Italy’s Sustainable Fashion Awards 2022
NEW YORK — Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana held a press event Wednesday, teasing the finalists for its upcoming Sustainable Fashion Awards.
The luncheon was held at the Casa Cipriani in the Seaport neighborhood of lower Manhattan and convened executives from the CFDA, Launchmetrics and more. As with last year, the Italian fashion chamber partnered with the U.N. Ethical Fashion Initiative for the sustainability awards, with past partners including Eco-Age. Support this year comes from the Italian Trade Agency, among other governmental groups.
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This year, actress Rossy de Palma will host the awards at La Scala theater on Sept. 25, closing out Milan Fashion Week.
This year’s Sustainable Fashion Awards will present 12 awards, among them the Visionary Award, the Human Rights Award and the Emerging Designers award. The last ceremony was held digitally in 2020 because of the pandemic but this year promises to be show-stopping.
At the luncheon, Desiree Bollier, chair of value retail management and luxury shopping center The Bicester Village, announced the three finalists for The Bicester Collection Award for Emerging Designers, among them: Torlowei, an all-encompassing fashion house based in Lagos, Nigeria; sustainable Nigerian brand Nkwo; and Themoiré, a Milan-based fashion project aiming to have the lowest possible environmental impact. The winners will get the chance for mentorship, production and distribution opportunities.
The judging and advisory committee counts the likes of the Ethical Fashion Initiative’s founder Simone Cipriani, Dame Ellen MacArthur (who is the honored chair of the jury), as well as nonprofits like Textile Exchange and Redress. The designer applicant pool was narrowed down from 200 to a shortlist aided in part by data partner Quantis.
Carlo Capasa is the current chairman of the country’s fashion association which has an impressive board of executives, among them Prada’s Patrizio Bertelli (co-CEO alongside wife Miuccia Prada), Gucci’s Marco Bizzarri and Ermenegildo Zegna’s Gildo Zegna.
As Capasa highlighted in the opening remarks, the CNMI Sustainable Fashion Awards will be instrumental in measuring the state of the industry in terms of sustainability, but also of inclusivity and diversity. Since its inception, CNMI has developed comprehensive guidelines in areas like chemical management which is used by 92 percent of the Italian supply chain in fashion.
Capasa summarized how far the group mentality has come for the collective.
“In Italy, we are very individualistic. This idea of cooperation wasn’t so easy in the beginning,” he said. “They found out that with sustainability, you do it all together or you don’t do it. Nobody can say ‘I’m sustainable,’ unless the whole chain is sustainable, the whole process is sustainable, the whole distribution is sustainable. It doesn’t work alone. That’s why I say we have to cooperate. Ourselves, the CFDA — because all of us represent a community. We have to work together.”
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