Green Fashion Lab: the future of sustainable fashion begins with education

Green Fashion Lab, the first laboratory for sustainable fashion students in Veneto created by Confartigianato Imprese Padova with the Cosmo Higher Technical Institute and the mentorship of Tiziano Guardini

Combining craftsmanship and sustainability for a fashion that looks to the future, thanks to the creative vision of the new generations. This is the goal of the Green Fashion Lab project promoted by Confartigianato Imprese Padova under the patronage of the Municipality of Padua.

Tuesday, July 5 at 6 PM in the Agorà of the San Gaetano Cultural Center in Padua, the capsule collections of the young students from the Cosmo Higher Technical Institute, who attended the two-year Fashion Coordinator course, will be on the runway.

Opening the event, presented by journalist Micaela Faggiani, will be a talk by Laura Scarpa and Lorenzo Cinotti, creators and curators of Venice Fashion Week. This will be followed by the fashion show of the young students from the groups NOIZE (Alessandro Sciacca, Chiara Capparotto, Eleonora Zorzi, Irene Tisato) and MUTATIO (Elena Bresolin, Giorgia Cassani, Priscilla Grasso, Giorgia Michelon).

Venice Fashion Week, a culture and fashion event created by Veneziadavivere, contributes to the international debate on sustainable fashion, supports young creative talents, promotes designers and brands, and is committed to safeguarding the high craftsmanship of Venice and the Veneto region through events, performances, fashion shows, conferences, and exhibitions.

Laura Scarpa and Lorenzo Cinotti will discuss the role of fashion as a powerful vehicle for conveying important messages such as sustainability, and how communication can be decisive for a sector like craftsmanship, which in recent years has seen great interest from luxury markets and opportunities for visibility and international connections with events such as Homo Faber.

“The fashion sector increasingly needs young, creative, and innovative individuals,” explains Katia Pizzocaro, President of the Fashion System at Confartigianato Imprese Padova. “We wanted to involve them in a project work within a creative fashion laboratory, where they could reuse waste or reclaimed materials, in a logic of sustainability, with the help of local businesses and a highly experienced seamstress like Beniamina Zecchin, president of tailors and designers at Confartigianato Abbigliamento.”

Created thanks to the contribution of EBAV – Ente Bilaterale Artigianato Veneto, Green Fashion Lab is a new language to connect the contemporary and the artisanal, where fashion is a vision of the future and sustainability is a lifestyle.

Sustainable fashion and ways

For the Green Fashion Lab project, the students and the school utilized the expertise and support of artisans and major companies in Veneto. Together, they committed to an on-the-job training path covering the complete development of collections, from concept to presentation.

The first phase of this project featured eco-designer Tiziano Guardini as a mentor. Students learned his entrepreneurial and creative philosophy based on respect for the environment and the recovery of out-of-stock materials and the reuse of natural materials, leading to the creation of a sustainable fashion collection.

During the year, the students, divided into two groups, laid the foundations for a new formula of “making fashion” in balance with nature and in line with the environmental urgency: more conscious and with the commitment to strive, through new techniques and materials, for zero impact: zero CO2 emissions and zero waste.

“To raise awareness and inform generations prior to Gen Z regarding the core values that characterize our research, based on four fundamental themes: digitalization, mental health, inclusion, and sustainability, represented through metaphors with linings, cuts, accessories, colors, and shapes. NOIZE is a play on words between “noise” and “Z”, the generation of digital natives born between 1997 and 2012.”

“Our concept enters the life of a Gen Z teenager who is dealing with social media, aesthetics, and superficiality. With the MUTATIO collection, we want to tell the story of a generation that found itself unknowingly in an era that changed the flow of the world: the digital era.
What used to be is represented by the most classic fabric that has never lost its fame over the years, DENIM, which is contaminated by a “fabric” that breaks the rules, a fabric that cannot be created by a loom: PVC.”

There is much anticipation, therefore, for Tuesday, July 5, when we will see two sustainable collections made with recycled textile materials and with the help and supervision of local master fashion artisans: a virtuous example in Veneto that chooses to invest in a sustainable training and supply chain model.