This weekend, the first virtual summit on circular fashion will take place, in a computer-generated Grand Palais. Lorenzo Albrighi, the founder of Lablaco, the platform behind the event, tells more about this immersive experience, designed to bring its participants “in a whole new dimension”.

By Ludmilla Intravaia

As Paris Fashion Week has just started yesterday, this weekend will see the Circular Fashion Summit open at the Grand Palais in Paris. But not the Grand Palais, In Real Life. A 3D Grand Palais, recreated by computer, a virtual reality setting for an event accessible only through a VR headset. At the initiative of the summit, Lorenzo Albrighi, co-CEO and founder of Lablaco, the platform dedicated to the acceleration of the digitization of fashion and its transition towards circular economy, says more to Le Boudoir Numérique about these two days of discussions, round tables, seminars and meetings, around the topic of a fashion more respectful of the environment and sentient beings.

Le Boudoir Numérique : Why a Circular Fashion Summit in virtual reality? 

Lorenzo Albrighi, Co-CEO & founder of Lablaco : Due to the global pandemic we find ourselves in, it would have been irresponsible to even think of uniting large groups of people in the physical world, as it did not seem to bring value to demand time from people to show them pre-recorder videos, Instagram lives or Zoom calls. We wanted to create an experience which brought our changemakers beyond digital, in a whole new dimension. For this reason, it is not possible to join the summit with smartphones or traditional desktop computers. 

What is the mission of the Circular Fashion Summit? 

It’s to gather industry leaders from design, technology and sustainability to discuss, but also to start immediate action to accelerate the transition of the fashion industry towards a digitized circular economy, by setting three measurable goals to achieve collectively, every twelve months (read more about these goals, on the Circular Fashion Summit website here, AN). 

For the moment, due to the Coronavirus crisis, we see a lot of virtual influencers, virtual clothes, virtual fashion shows… is virtuality the future of fashion? And how can it be useful to create a more sustainable fashion?

Like food and transportation, it is not possible to digitize fashion 100%. For us, it is not to create digital fantasy worlds, but to align the digital to the physical, as an augmentation for a new luxury experience. VR, like any tool, can be used to build phenomenal experiences. In our case, we are creating a new multidimensional human-centric experience for the fashion industry, helping people connect in the midst of a global pandemic, safely and avoiding the need to travel.  

* The Circular Fashion Summit takes place from October 3 to 4, 2020, in virtual reality. More info on the event website here. The Lablaco website is there. 

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