Next Gen Assembly

Formerly the Youth Fashion Summit, GFA Academy’s Next Gen Assembly convenes talented students and young professionals in an impactful advocacy programme, enabling the next generation to gain access to the industry, have their voices heard and ideas nurtured.

About Next Gen Assembly

With a fundamental focus on purposeful storytelling, the role of the Next Gen Assembly will be to collaboratively nurture stories of the ingenuity and creativity of humanity in its many forms, across the fashion system and beyond.

The Next Gen Assembly programme empowers and elevates the voices of academia and young creatives from around the world who aspire to accelerate impact and advocate for the next generation of fashion practitioners and professionals.

Through a series of online workshops and courses, as well as playing an integral role at the Global Fashion Summit, Next Gen Assembly is supported in developing advocacy and communications skills to foster the selected candidates’ development as sustainability changemakers. GFA Academy will appoint seven candidates during the spring of 2023

In Partnership with

Meet the Members

    Ikeoluwa Adebisi

    Founder, UpTote by IKÉ

    Ikeoluwa Adebisi

    Founder, UpTote by IKÉ

    Ikeoluwa Adebisi is a sustainable fashion advocate, fashion entrepreneur, and digital creator. She is currently building UpTote by IKÉ, a circular fashion brand that transforms pre-consumer textile waste into functional and fashionable pieces. Through her work as a fashion content creator and social media manager, she simplifies complex sustainability ideas to reach diverse audiences. Her ultimate goal is to assist Small and Medium Enterprises in Africa in creating fashion brands that prioritise sustainability across the entire apparel supply chain.

    Prakriti Choubey

    MA Fashion Entrepreneurship and Innovation Student

    Prakriti Choubey

    MA Fashion Entrepreneurship and Innovation Student

    Prakriti Choubey, a postgraduate student at LCF and a graduate with a gold medal from NIFT, Delhi, is deeply passionate about preserving the rich cultural heritage embodied in traditional crafts. With expertise in digital fashion, Choubey envisions her project Avatirna as a brand that disrupts perceptions of crafts by representing them in the virtual world through collectibles. As one of the top 50 emerging Web3 Fashion designers awarded by The SYKY, she aims to create social change in the industry through innovation.

    Pedro Ferreira

    Country Leader, Slow Fashion Brazil

    Pedro Ferreira

    Country Leader, Slow Fashion Brazil

    Pedro Ferreira is currently pursuing a degree in the Erasmus Mundus Master’s Program in Circular Economy. Raised in the Brazilian capital of leather shoes, he is passionate about understanding the environmental impact of leather tanning and exploring possible alternatives. For the past two years, Ferreira has been leading the Slow Fashion Movement Brazil – a local chapter of an international non-profit that promotes sustainable consumption and circularity in fashion. He strongly believes that empowering consumers to make sustainable choices is key, and that guilt or shame should never be used as motivators.

    Kaja Grujic

    Filmmaker, Climate Advocate, and Brand Marketing Assistant, SOJO

    Kaja Grujic

    Filmmaker, Climate Advocate, and Brand Marketing Assistant, SOJO

    Placing climate justice at the heart of fashion practice, Kaja Grujic aims to craft a new story for fashion. With a multidisciplinary background in film and political science, she explored the powerful intersection of art and change-making, completing the Dual BA program between Sciences Po Paris and Columbia University. She continued to the MA Fashion Futures course at the London College of Fashion. Her MA thesis film, Entangled, has been screened at international events, including the Creative Climate Awards in New York, where it won the Audience Award.

    Jesse Boga Madriaga

    Writer & Journalist

    Jesse Boga Madriaga

    Writer & Journalist

    Jesse Boga Madriaga is a journalism-trained writer in the Philippines who has extensive work in news and lifestyle media, PR, and science communication. He writes for the Mindanao Times and the Philippine Daily Inquirer. His current graduate school journey in the University of Mindanao explores the role of community voices in fashion and sustainability. As a WEF Global Shaper, Madriaga takes leadership roles in convening youth and communities for inclusive conversations about sustainability. He believes in the power of writing and creating storytelling-centred platforms to achieve global goals.

    Sanjana Pimoli

    Assistant Manager, Communications & Sustainability Innovations, Shahi Exports

    Sanjana Pimoli

    Assistant Manager, Communications & Sustainability Innovations, Shahi Exports

    Sanjana Pimoli is an Assistant Manager within the Communications and Sustainability Innovations Team at Shahi Exports. She holds a degree in Economics Hons and Environmental Law & Policy. With industry experience in sustainability innovations, CSR, and agricultural R&D, she leverages partnerships to support sustainable fashion by piloting new technologies and building business models for scaling. She is among 1000 global talents in the Unleash Innovation Lab 2022, collaborating on the world’s pressing sustainability issues. She envisions a fashion industry that leverages collaboration to accelerate circularity and focuses on doing more good than bad for the environment.

    Clara Tomé

    Fashion Model & Young EU Climate Pact Ambassador

    Clara Tomé

    Fashion Model & Young EU Climate Pact Ambassador

    Clara Tomé interned with UNEP as a Young EU Climate Pact Ambassador in sustainable fashion communications. Tomé believes that sustainability and responsible consumption are linked, as every time we spend money on a garment, we are voting for the type of industry we want. Sustainability means balance between our development and environment conservation. That co-dependency is undervalued to such a point of disconnection, where only the law and storytelling can redefine the value of garments and shift the fast fashion culture.

    Indira Varma

    Fashion & Textiles Designer

    Indira Varma

    Fashion & Textiles Designer

    Indira Varma is a fashion and textiles designer, passionate about cultural sustainability. A fresh graduate from the LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, her graduation project is focused on innovative sustainable production processes that support craft practices while emphasising on biodegradability and circularity. Her research explores sustainability in cultural practices in India such as natural dyes, block printing and handloom weaves that decolonise fashion systems. She constantly engages with the community through her sustainability awareness initiatives, internships, and participation in events.

Next Gen Assembly Masterclass

Ambassador

Sustainable Fashion Activist, Photojournalist, and Speaker Aditi Mayer is the ambassador for the Next Gen Assembly.

Mayer explores the intersections of style, sustainability, and social justice. Seeing the fashion industry’s disproportionate on people of color globally, Mayer unpacks the historical and sociopolitical underpinnings that allow the fashion industry to function in a colonial manner, and explores what decolonization means in practice. Her practice spans grassroots organizing in Downtown LA’s garment district to preserving ancestral wisdom in India’s handloom industry. In 2020, she was named a Fulbright x National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellow and spent 2022 in India documenting the intersections of agriculture and artisan culture in relation to fashion. Her work has been celebrated by the likes of Vogue, National Geographic, The UN, The Guardian, ELLE, and more.

Aditi Mayer Sustainable Fashion Blogger, Photojournalist and Labour Rights Activist
"As a sustainable fashion activist whose work has spanned grassroots organising, photojournalism, writing and more, I'm honoured to help inform the next generation of storytellers on how to engage in the radical work of reimagination through storytelling. The climate crisis presents a crisis of narrative- we need to engage in the work of solutions-oriented journalism to inform our next steps as a culture and global community; and fashion, being a vehicle for storytelling, presents an amazing tool for climate action."

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