Promoting ethnic fashion

KOCHI:In a first-of-its-kind initiative, India Fashion Incubator (IFI) was launched at Lulu Marriot to enrich and nurture the fashion designers and entrepreneurs across the country.The programme was launched at the second edition of India Fashion summit 2018 organised in association with Kerala State Institute of Design and Kerala Academy for Skills Excellence, Government of Kerala. Vinod Nair, President India Fashion Summit said the main aim of the India Fashion Incubator is to promote the Indian fashion community by helping fashion entrepreneurs to develop their business and professional skills. He highlighted that this will provide an ecosystem for sustainable development of fashion with prime focus on promoting hand-woven textiles in designer fashion and nurturing exceptional young talents in the field of fashion.

Dr Sreeram Venketaraman, MD,  Kerala Academy for Skills Excellence said that India Fashion Incubator is a non-profit organization, where the incubation programmes help the designers to get a 360-degree support through one-on-one mentoring, expert, seminars and master classes, shared workspace, design studio partnerships, exclusive networking, promotional and marketing opportunities, valuable trend and business resources and market leads. IFI will use the latest digital technologies to mentor, network and collaborate with the incubated fashion designers, he added.

Vinod mentioned that the Indian fashion industry has seen tremendous growth in terms of talents, structured ways of doing business through fashion weeks organized by Fashion Design Council of India as well as Lakme and IMG Reliance.  “However, we never had a platform to discuss and deliberate various aspects relating to the fashion industry in India and India Fashion Summit was created to fill that void”, he said. He added that each year we invite the leaders as well as youngsters to the summit and discuss on topics related to latest fashion trends.

Last time the theme was ‘Indian Fashion — The Way Forward’ and this year’s theme is ‘Sustainable Fashion- Hand-woven Magic. The summit is intended to encourage the traditional handloom sector of the state. “Kerala has some of the best hand-woven fabrics in the country and we propose to introduce the same to the designer industry through this summit’ Vinod said. The IFI was inaugurated by the distinguished guests including Tom Jose IAS and renowned designer Manish Malhotra. Other well-known designers including Peter D’Ascoli, Wendell Rodricks, Arjun Khanna, Suket Dhir, Alan Alexander Kaleekal, Jebin Johny and Hari Anand and Online Fashion Retail Heads including Narendra Kumar (Creative Head, Amazon Fashion) and Nihal Rajan, Head of Design-MFB, Myntra Designs graced the launching .