#17 – Digitizing Fashion: Regenerative Approaches in Web 3.0 and Beyond | Yoona.ai, Unfolding Strategies, VORN Academy

Show notes

In recent years, the market for virtual fashion has boomed, raising debates about its relevance and possibilities. As fashion migrates into the digital realm, it reaches far beyond NFT’s and digital wardrobes – digital innovations and AI have the power to impact the industry from the design and traceability of physical garments, to social critique, to education and open-source tools.

Three experts join us with unique touchpoints to working on the pioneering edge of critical digital transformation. Anna Franziska Michel is the founder and CEO of Yoona.ai, a fashion tech company that offers AI-powered design solutions with the goal of reducing material impact. Beata Wilczek founded Unfolding Strategies to bring critical education and training to the sustainable digital transformation of fashion, underscoring its entanglements with social and environmental power structures. Finally, Marte Hentschel, the co-founder of VORN – The Berlin Fashion Hub, shares the results of the VORN Academy’s first cohort. In this community-sourced program, nine local designers collaborated on a phygital fashion collection and immersive experience, tackling topics of circularity, over-consumption, and the internal contradictions of sustainable fashion. Both Anna Franziska Michel and Beata Wilczek supported the VORN Academy as trainers, to help the designers hone their digital approach.

Our hosts Max and Magdalena reflect on how all three speakers circle around a core question: can digital fashion and design processes truly imagine a new status quo? Or does digitization merely replicate the dysfunctions of the global fashion system as it currently stands?

To learn more about our guests: Follow Yoona.ai at https://www.yoona.ai/ Follow Unfolding Strategies at https://www.unfoldingstrategies.com/ And for more critical listening, check out Beata Wilczek’s podcast Fashion Knowledge at https://www.unfoldingstrategies.com/podcast/ Finally, you can check out the final project of the VORN Academy at https://academy.vorn-hub.com/

For more information about 202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit, including updates about our next edition, visit https://202030summit.com/, and follow us on social media @202030summit.

202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit is organized by studio MM04, in cooperation with the Beneficial Design Institute. Edition #5 was a Partner of Berlin Fashion Week, funded by the Senate Department for Economics, Energy and Public Enterprises Berlin in cooperation with Fashion Council Germany.