Lalaland winner of Tommy Hilfiger award for social innovation in fashion
Amsterdam-based company Lalaland was announced as one of the two winners of the Tommy Hilfiger Fashion Frontier Challenge. The challenge is a global programme, designed to find and support ideas that lead to a more inclusive fashion landscape.
The Tommy Hilfiger Fashion Frontier Challenge
Tommy Hilfiger, part of PVH Corp., announced the two winners of the Tommy Hilfiger Fashion Frontier Challenge. The Fashion Frontier Challenge is a dedicated global programme to find and support ideas that lead to a more inclusive fashion landscape. Six finalists presented their concepts to a jury panel during the final virtual event, held on January 12 and 13. More than 430 startups and scaleups from 22 countries joined the challenge.
The two winners are the Amsterdam-based Lalaland, which uses AI to generate customised and inclusive synthetic models of different ethnicities, and UZURI K&Y, a Rwandan-based eco-friendly shoe brand. The winning companies received €100,000 each, as well as a year-long mentorship with internal experts from Tommy Hilfiger and from INSEAD, one of the world's leading graduate business schools.
Lalaland: inclusivity through AI
Founded and based in Amsterdam, the winning team of Lalaland are contributing to a more inclusive industry by their clever use of artificial intelligence. They create 'AI fashion models' of different ethnicities.
Michael Musandu, co-founder and CEO of Lalaland, said: "Creating technology that drives a more inclusive and diverse e-commerce platform is at the heart of our vision at Lalaland. Being part of the Tommy Hilfiger Fashion Frontier Challenge brought incredible insights and will elevate our AI solution to reach more people than we could have imagined. Through donning this achievement, our team cannot wait to empower a welcoming online shopping experience, so no consumer feels underrepresented."
Tommy Hilfiger said: "This empowering challenge brought together passionate and hard-working individuals with fresh ideas on how to create a future of fashion we can all look forward to. It was an impressive final event, and I am proud to continue this journey with the entrepreneurs who presented groundbreaking and impactful solutions that challenge how we think, build and create."
Amsterdam's leading sustainable fashion industry
The Amsterdam Area is home to a wide range of innovators when it comes to sustainable fashion. Examples include BYBORRE, whose textile innovation studio helps designers create custom fabrics, Wieland Textiles, which makes new fabrics from recycled materials, Dyecoo, which has developed a water and chemical-free dying process, The Renewal Workshop, which helps companies launch renewal and resell platforms, and Lena Library, which encourages fashion lovers to rent clothing. Next to this, Amsterdam is home to Fashion for Good, the world's first museum and accelerator dedicated to sustainable fashion.