The V All–Russian FASHION 4.0 – EVOLUTION Festival opens in Ivanovo On

December 12, the V All-Russian FASHION 4.0 - EVOLUTION Festival opens in Ivanovo with the participation of young designers representing leading schools of training specialists for the fashion industry.

The festival is the flagship project of Ivanovo State Polytechnic University and ANO "World of Arts - II" (Moscow) and has been held in Ivanovo since 2018. It is supported by the Association of Entrepreneurs of the Textile and Clothing Industry of the Ivanovo Region, the Faculty of Arts of the Lomonosov Moscow State University, the Shuisky Calico HBC and a number of other organizations. It is part of the line of landmark youth events initiated by the Ivanovo Polytechnic University and reflecting the main milestones of the formation and strengthening of the leading Ivanovo textile and clothing design school in Russia. Among them, the first All–Russian festival of Student Fashion Houses (1988), the regional stages of the International Competition of Young Designers "Russian Silhouette" (1999 - present) and, in fact, the All-Russian festival "FASHION 4.0 - EVOLUTION" (2018 – present).

The goals of the Festival are to reveal the potential of young fashion designers and overcome the distance between them and production workers. In other words, the Festival works to weaken such destabilizing factors as professional uncertainty and the risk of young designers falling into the zone of separation from the industry and lack of demand in the labor market, which means that the Ivanovo region is positioned among young people as a region where you can live and work with dignity.

For four years, the Festival has already attracted the attention of youth audiences in more than 40 cities and is supported by leading specialized universities. But, most importantly, it has become interesting to Ivanovo entrepreneurs who are ready to support talented young people with prizes, internships, joint projects, participation in business events and fashion shows. The president of the Festival is also a successful entrepreneur and public figure Vladimir Vikyu, and the guests of the Festival at various times were young managers and specialists of enterprises who have achieved heights in the profession and well-known faces in the fashion world - Alena Akhmadullina, Irina Korneva, Irina Krutikova.

In this jubilee season, the Festival is timed to coincide with the Year of Cultural Heritage of the Peoples of Russia and will once again be held with the support of the Presidential Foundation for Cultural Initiatives. The participants will have a week-long program with open lectures, master classes, a presentation of the domestic CAD clothing Center "Assol", excursions to the "Shuisky calico", Kineshma knitting factory "Blackram", to the Museum of Ivanovo calico. The focus will continue to be on a professional competition among textile and clothing designers, where the conformity of design ideas with modern fashion and style trends, their compatibility with technology and the availability of prerequisites for creating a new product niche or brand is appreciated, and two competitive tracks are personally supervised by the president of the Festival Vladimir Vikyu and the CEO of Shuisky Chintz Anna Bogadelina, who established nominal awards for absolute winners.

The culmination of the Festival will be a Gala show open to the public with awarding of winners, out-of-competition shows of industrial fashion brands, author's brands and children's fashion theaters, and innovations - an additional competitive nomination "author's costume with ethno elements", the launch of a web gallery of finalists of the Festival of different years, the opening of a Star Lounge - a meeting place with celebrities and just interesting people. This year, famous Russian fashion designers Irina Krutikova and Alice Tolkacheva, founder and president of the company "Russian Seasons" and the accelerator Seasons Tech Daria Matsievskaya, CEO of the country's oldest industry fair TEKSTILLEGPROM Galina Sakovich and curator of design projects of the International Exhibition CPM Galina Istomina will come to meet young designers.

Four thematic exhibitions will also decorate the Festival. One of them is dedicated to the first All-Union festival of student Fashion Houses. The second one will open at the Museum and Exhibition Center in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Department of Costume Design and Textiles of the IVSPU. Residents of Ivanovo and guests of the city will see competitive fabric crocs in the new city art center Arteria, and paintings and graphic works by fashion designers and textile drawing masters will decorate the site at the Polytechnic. In the same place, an updated demo hall will open at the Polytechnic, where the entire range of fabrics produced in Ivanovo is presented, and a photo studio will take the first customers, promising novice designers and sellers on the marketplaces a premium photo content. It turns out that thanks to the Festival, in Ivanovo, in one place it will be possible to find both suppliers of domestic fabrics, and clothing manufacturers, and designers with photographers who are ready to create and promote it to the market.