Image Courtesy – Helsinki Fashion Week

The Helsinki Fashion Week Digital Village takes traditional principles of sustainability in Fashion into Cyberspace.

Evelyn Mora, the 28-year-old founder of Helsinki Fashion Week , is a fashion week disruptor. She launched it in 2015 as an alternative to mainstays Paris and Milan with the intention to create space for sustainable conversation and digital innovation.

Similar to the digital iteration of London Fashion Week held in June, the Helsinki Fashion Week that ended on Sunday, operated out of an online hub. But unlike London Fashion Week, where most collections were shown as fashion films, Helsinki pushed the boat out further.

This year, the Digital Village in the Helsinki Fashion Week was a cyberspace embracing connection culture where all fashion, buying, showing, and networking were interlinked. Its users represent a node on one open platform built to educate, facilitate collaboration, and inspire. The Digital Village is aiming to break free from national and traditional restrictions. It focuses on creating an international and inclusive, culture friendly, and open community of interdisciplinary creatives that connect through global culture.

Image Courtesy – Helsinki Fashion Week Live

Close to one hundred buyers were invited to join and experience the remote buying experience on the HFW cyberspace and Designers also got the opportunity to sell their digital assets on the Helsinki-Fashion Week 3D Digital Village.

The Digital Village in 2020 was built to carry the shows of the Selected global sustainable designers fashion shows, created entirely in 3D. Besides 3D scanning of the IRL models and creating the 3D planets and environments for each show by the HFW creative partner NDA Paris and Soldats films, each look is designed by the traditional sustainable designer.

The main purpose of HFW cyberspace is to connect people through a global culture where data is democratized and accessible to the individuals who created that data in the first place.

For Helsinki, which prides itself on being the world’s first truly sustainable fashion week, tech and sustainability need to be part of the same conversation if fashion is going to progress.