Fashion for Good selects young creatives to create Grow 2.0 exhibition with biomaterials

As announced at the beginning of the year, global sustainability initiative Fashion for Good has been looking for creatives for its talent project Grow, a three-month program that will start in July 2021. Now, six young creatives have been selected and presented to the public: four fashion designers - Frederieke Broekgaarden, Charlotte Bakkenes, Huong Nguyen and Eva Sonneveld - as well as content creator Christian Mpamo and copywriter Zainab Goelaman.

They were selected from a pool of 119 applicants from across the Netherlands by a jury of creative professionals in a session moderated by Katrin Ley, managing director of Fashion for Good. As part of the Grow talent project, the six young individuals will create an exhibition for the Fashion for Good museum. Innovative, sustainable biomaterials will, for the first time, be used to create sustainable garments by them and together they will create a story around the process.  

Grow 2.0 will showcase sustainable garments and their creation process

“It’s important to test and investigate the properties of these materials that will drive change and have a positive impact on the industry. We’re extremely excited to have the talents experiment and test these biomaterials, and to see the unique creations they will realise through this project,” commented Ley in a press release on Tuesday.

Grow talent is a part of Fashion for Good’s year-long exhibition Grow 1.0, which focuses on biomaterials in the fashion industry and is currently open to the public. During the Grow talent project, which runs from June to September, the six creatives will work towards creating the second exhibition, Grow 2.0, to be launched in October 2021. 

While the four fashion designers will create garments using innovative biomaterials as well as exploring and testing how they can be used to create the sustainable fashion industry of the future, content creator Mpamo and copywriter Goelaman will capture the project’s entire journey from concept to the final exhibition. This will include sharing progress and updates of the project for the world to follow as well as being a part of the new exhibition. 

The materials are provided to the creatives by Fashion for Good innovators Flocus, based in the Netherlands, with textiles made from Kapok fibre, Finnish innovator Spinnova with their pioneering cellulosic based fibre, French-Indian innovator Green Whisper that creates banana fibre-based textiles, and American innovator Natural Fiber Welding that developed MIRUM, a plant based, plastic free leather alternative that is entirely recyclable. 

Apart from the creations from the Grow talent project, Grow 2.0 will also show the wider application of biomaterials with an original biomaterial creation from designer Iris van Herpen as well as a garment created by designer Karim Adduchi using Orange Fiber’s innovative silk-like fabric made from waste from the citrus industry. Running until March 2022, the exhibition will then travel to three major European cities, which have not been named yet.