Amity Mumbai hosts e-lecture series on fashion, designing and ideation

To cater to the globally expanding fashion industry, Amity School of Fashion Design and Technology (ASFDT), Mumbai hosted a series of three international e-lectures in February 2022. This lecture series strives to connect global talent in design, retail, fashion business and theory with the students. In addition, the series aims to engage students from across design disciplines with makers, practitioners, and scholars in the global fashion industry.

International researchers, designers, illustrators and managers from Italy, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia were brought upon to share insights in the world of fashion. The series focused on current trending topics like “Buying and Retail Trends in Global Fashion Industry”, “Design for a Cause” and “Sculpted Fashion”.

Speaking at the online event, Pallabi Baro, a key account manager at a fashion retail business house at Milan, Italy said, “One of the biggest trends in circularity in the fashion industry is the introduction of the product passports in the business model.”

The lecture stressed that to keep up with the trends, fashion players with international footprints would need to look at investment decisions with precisions and reassess local conditions regularly while mitigation for market-specific risks.

Students also launched into a small discussion about the significant variation in recovery profile across consumer markets and various sourcing countries that play a critical role in fashion chain supply. Such knowledge allows students to expand on their vision to think globally but do it locally. It also included case studies and discussions revolving around key buzzwords like metaverse, NFTs in fashion, omnichannel strategies, product passports and blockchain technology, to expand on students’ ideas of making and sustaining a fashion product.

The second lecture of the series on “Design for a Cause” was delivered by Narmeen Hamadeh, a freelance designer and digital illustrator based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. She explored the relationship between social causes and art. Hamadeh said, “Creative activism is about touching upon the ugly topics but exploring them in a beautiful way, thinking globally, but doing it locally, by inserting oneself in social issues relevant to one’s life. Giving the design a character, a story, always adds more value. You need to be flexible with social design; and make it affordable so that we can do as much as we can for others.” More of her works have been featured in Vogue Arabia and on national television too. “Design for a cause is not about you as a designer; it is about the topic at hand,” she added.

The series concluded with Lyva Indra, an Indonesian designer and design researcher, talking about how raw materials can be used to create sustainable and futuristic fashion.

This international lecture series was envisaged with the objective to help generate students’ curiosity in the developments happening in the global fashion industry, make them aware of the advancements in designing, ideation and creation process, and raise their awareness about worldwide sustainability and futurism.