As Milan Fashion Week got underway, Vogue Italia and Yoox presented the second edition of The Next Green Talents, an event showcasing sustainability’s potential to elevate high-end fashion design. Held from Feb. 20-22 at Milan’s Palazzo Morando, the event strives to promote responsible production as well as mindful consumption.
Vogue Italia selected seven global designers to upcycle unused samples from luxury platform Yoox, with the finished designs available for purchase on yoox.com. Winners included British designer Bethany Williams, Cora Bellotto of Italy and emerging Brazilian talent Renata Buzzo. Elliot Atkinson, Suzanne Elvi, Veronika Kant, William Lundgren of the U.K.’s Bite Studios, Ksenia and Anton Schnaider of Ukrainian brand Ksenia Schnaider, Gabriela Luna and Corina del Pinal of Guatemalan label Luna Del Pinal, and Mozhdeh Matin of Peru’s Mozh Mozh also displayed their upcycled designs.
Federico Marchetti, chairman and CEO of YOOX Net-a-Porter Group, described these emerging design talents as embodying “both the spirit of our time and the questions that will define our tomorrow.”
“Today, the necessity to provide customers with innovative, sustainable consumption models is one of the most significant challenges that we face as a society,” Marchetti said in a statement about the event. “The seven talents that we selected this year with Sara Sozzani Maino and the Vogue Italia team put sustainability at the heart of their creativity, continuing our years of dedication to promoting a greener industry, long before ‘green’ was in fashion.”
Winning designers reworked a range of garments such as jackets, shirts, pants and sweater prototypes created by 8 by YOOX, the platform’s private label.