At the weekend designers from around the world descended on Trieste in
Italy for the 15th edition of the annual International Talent Support
contest, which celebrates emerging talent across fashion, accessories, art
and jewellery, and the Royal College of Art dominated the awards, winning
the ITS Accessories, the OTB Award, ITS Jewellery, and the Vogue Talents
awards.
Each year proceedings are dominated with finalists who study fashion in
the UK, with ITS claiming close to 90 percent of portfolios it receives
come from UK-based designers, and this year seemed to be extremely strong
for the Royal College of Art and the London College of Fashion, both
schools producing a high number of finalists in the fashion, accessories
and jewellery categories.
One of the big winners on the night was the Royal College of Art’s
Helen Kirkum. The footwear designer’s collection of trainers ‘Our Public
Youth’ captured the juries attention with her sustainable and
time-consuming concept that takes discarded trainers and rebuilds new
sneakers out of old parts using a collage technique.
Kirkum won the ITS Accessories Award, which includes a 10,000 euro cash
prize, as well as the Vogue Talents Award, which will see the designer’s
pieces featured on the Vogue Talents website and in the Vogue Italia
supplement.
This isn’t the first accolades that the young designer has won, in 2014,
she was awarded with the Worshipful Company of Cordwainers Footwear Student
of the Year honour, and the designer was selected as the overall winner of
the Adidas Forum Trainer Re-imagined project and offered an internship with
Adidas in Germany, which she starts this summer.
“I still can’t believe that I am the winner, it’s been amazing, so much
support,” said Kirkum after the awards. “It was also so great to see so
many other Royal College of Art winners as we’ve become a family, all
supporting each others work.”
Other Royal College of Art winner’s included Danish menswear designer
Niels Gundtoft Hansen, who was awarded the OTB Award, winning 5,000 euros
and the possibility of an internship in one of the group’s brands. He won
the award alongside designer Anna Bornholm, who last year won the Prix
Chloé at the Hyères Festival, as OTB president Renzo Rosso, who presented
the award on the night, stated that he loved both collections so much that
he couldn’t decide between the two.
While the ITS Jewellery award was presented to German Sari Rathel for
her Gender Blender collection of jewellery that allows deconstruction of
gender roles by allowing the wearer to edit how to wear the pieces
dependent on their identity. Her collection also recently received the Best
Work in Jewellery award at the annual Royal College of Art awards. Rathel
takes home 10,000 euros for her ITS win.
While London College of Fashion graduate Slovenian Jana Zornik picked up
the Swatch Prize in the Artwork section for her Utopian vision that a free
place is “where we can make our own rules and be whoever we wanna be”. Her
Little Marta collection of mechanised grooming collectables was also
presented as one of the finalists in the accessories category. Zornik wins
10,000 euros plus a six-month paid internship at the Swatch LAB in Zurich.
The main ITS Fashion Award was won by New Zealander Mayako Kano for her
‘Reverse Fade’ collection inspired by the concept of being caught in limbo
between “old” and “new” worlds represented by two layers that are in a
“state of deconstruction”. Kano studied fashion design at Antwerp’s Royal
Academy of Fine Arts, followed by a masters in Fashion Design and Society
at the Parsons School of Design in New York.
Other awards’s on the night included the YKK sponsored Accessories Award
that went to Korean Young Jin Jang, while the Swarovski Award was presented
to Tatiana Lobanova, and Italian artist Marco Baitella won 10,000 euros as
the ITS Artwork winner. There was also a second win for Anna Bornhold, the
German designer was awarded the Modateca Deanna Award, receiving 3,000
euros plus a 4-week Creative Knitwear Master Course, for her Kiss A Frog
But Only With Brushed Teeth collection of denim and knitwear.
British milliner Justin Smith, who was an ITS Contest finalist in 2007,
was awarded the Generali Future Award, an accolade that aims to support
creativity and talent, while also building synergies to “drive innovation,
competitiveness and growth”. Generali stated that Smith “perfectly embodies
the spirit” of the award for his “ever-evolving entrepreneurial spirit”.
Smith is best known for creating millinery for Angelina Jolie in
Maleficent, as well as hats for principals in The Man from U.N.C.L.E film.
As part of the honour, Smith will present a collection with Generali at
next year’s ITS Contest.
The International Talent Support contest was founded in 2002 by Barbara
Franchin, to support and celebrate young designers, as a way to give them
much needed recognition and exposure to launch their careers. Each year the
competition is held in the Northern Italian city of Trieste.
“For 15 years, thousands of young talents have been sharing with us
their creativity from all over the world,” said Franchin, International
Talent Support founder and director. “Since the beginning, we deeply
understood the profound meaning of what we were receiving. We weren’t just
dealing with projects, we were holding in our hand’s seeds of pure
creativity.”
Images: courtesy of International Talent Support