جريدة الوطن العربي سياسية – اجتماعية – اقتصادية – فنية- رياضية- مستقلة
Ibrahim ahmed
Tommy Hilfiger, which is owned by PVH Corp. [NYSE: PVH], has announced fashion tech start-up Lalaland a as winner of the third Tommy Hilfiger Fashion Frontier Challenge, a dedicated global program designed to find and support ideas that lead to a more inclusive fashion landscape. The program’s final virtual event took place on January 12th-13th, where the six finalists pitched their concepts to a prestigious jury panel.
More than 430 startups and scaleups from 22 countries submitted their ideas in January 2021 for this initiative, which echoes Tommy Hilfiger’s sustainability vision to Waste Nothing and Welcome All. This year’s program particularly strived to amplify and support Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) entrepreneurs who are working to advance their communities, while fostering a more inclusive future for the fashion industry. For the first time, fans of the TOMMY HILFIGER brand were able to participate in the initial phases of the challenge, where they cast their digital vote to help narrow down the applications to identify the finalists.
“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,” said Tommy Hilfiger. “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.”
Lalaland, a Dutch start-up uses artificial intelligence to generate customized and inclusive virtual fashion models of different ethnicities, body sizes, body shapes and ages was awarded a prize fund of €100,000 and receive a year-long mentorship with internal experts from Tommy Hilfiger and from INSEAD — one of the world’s leading and largest graduate business schools. “Creating technology that drives a more inclusive and diverse e-commerce platform is at the heart of our vision at Lalaland,” said Michael Musandu, co-founder, and CEO of Lalaland. “Being part of the Tommy Hilfiger Fashion Frontier Challenge brought incredible insights and will elevate our A.I. 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 under-represented.”
To celebrate this exciting moment Lalaland today launched an exclusive NFT artwork ‘Marcia’ which is exclusively created to celebrate winning the Tommy Hilfiger Fashion Frontier Challenge. Marcia is a one-of-a-kind synthetically generated meta-human model created using neural networks.
Of the 9 owners of this NFT, 8 have been gifted and now owned by the prestigious jury of the Tommy Hilfiger Fashion Frontier Challenge which includes:
- Mr. Tommy Hilfiger
- Martijn Hagman, CEO, Tommy Hilfiger Global and PVH Europe
- Yara Shahidi, award-winning actress, producer, and change agent
- Esther Verburg, EVP, Sustainable Business and Innovation, Tommy Hilfiger Global and PVH Europe
- Adrian Johnson, Entrepreneur, Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship, Technology and Media at INSEAD
- Katrin Ley, Managing Director of Fashion for Good and Founding Curator of the Amsterdam Global Shapers Hub
- Yvonne Bajela, founding member and principal at investment firm Impact X Capital
- Arooj Aftab, fashion creative and inclusion consultant.
The ninth and final owner of NFT will be auctioned off to the public. The auction will run until February 14th! Offers can already be made to purchase the NFT on Opensea.
