Caterina Ailiesei has graduated as textile engineer at the Technical University “Gh.Asachi” Iasi, Romania, class of 1995.

Entering the challenging world of fashion in 2003 Caterina established Katty Fashion, a company,www.katty-fashion.com, which designs, develops and produce apparel.

By taking garment designs from concept to creation, development and production, Katty Fashion is able to produce collections for many well respected European labels. Caterina loves her job, the satisfaction of looking for new styles is something that she enjoys to do.

For some time Katty Fashion is working on the needed fashion paradigm shift from traditional to digital/circular business models.

For the last 8 years Caterina Ailiesei has been the promoter of innovation for sustainable development of textile industry at regional and european level and founded Reginnova NE a innovation association which links all regional representatives of quadruple helix for fluent strategy and balanced development in years to come.

Lana Dumitru is a designer and digital artist awarded by Forbes with “the best young Romanian fashion designer” award. Her eponymous label and design studio is currently based in Lisbon.

Lana has finished her research in London and earned a PhD in Digital Arts and Fashion.

You can consider LD an artist manifesting her beliefs through design and fashion as you would find Lana’s clothing in an art gallery or in a museum but also in a shop.

Her original style comes from the fact that she designs all her visuals and patterns, transforming pure white fabrics into strong unique conceptual pieces through the means of digital printing, laser cutting and digital prototyping. The Lana Dumitru Design Studio is collaborating for more than 10 years with other brands, companies, doing bespoke and commissioned work, artistic collaborations, textile design, new media, digital design and so on.

Lana is the first Romanian designer to officially collaborate with Puma in a custom print jacket coined “T7 Etno Shake Puma by Lana” and with many other international brands and companies.

She was included by Forbes in Top 30 under 30 entrepreneurs and her work has been showcased at London Fashion Week/International Fashion Showcase, Strasbourg Fashion Week, Holon Design Museum, Kalmar Art Museum and Malmö Design Centre Sweden, Salone del Mobile Milano, Horniman Museum London, National Village Museum Bucharest, Cultural Institutes, Art Galleries, Design Weeks around the world and more.

In 2017, Lana co-founded the brand Foræva together with architect Vlad Tenu, dressing artists like Bjork and working with brands like Swarovski International.

With many collections in her portfolio which have consisted, until now, in “wearable opinions”- as she describes her clothes- Lana has won the jury’s appreciation in various design competitions: Puma Creativity Award, Pasarela/Institut Francais de la Mode contest finalist, Elle Decoration- Design of the year nominee- Lana for Photoliu, Young Creative Chevrolet Award-Romania, product design awards, etc. and added to her credentials the quality of being a previous member of the digital design team for Mary Katrantzou in London.

Newspapers and magazines like Vogue, New York Times, La Repubblica etc. published her works.

PhD in Industrial Design and Multimedia Communication at Politecnico di Milano, was Scholar Researcher at the IIT Chicago. Full professor, she is Deputy Director of the Department of Design at Polimi. Cofounder of the research collective “Fashion in Process”, expert in creative processes and design management in culture intensive industries, with a specific focus on fashion and more recently on the impact of digital transformation to support the transition towards sustainability. This research collective led to the creation of the Fashion in Process Research Lab, in 2011.

Fashion in Process is a multidisciplinary research collective at the Department of Design – Politecnico di Milano. FiP focuses on innovation for culture intensive industries, bridging technologies and humanities through a design driven approach. FiP develops research, applied projects and knowledge transfer activities aiming at supporting and promoting the sustainable development of fashion and cultural and creative industries. It aims to enhance their potential through design research, transforming cultural reservoirs and knowledge assets into real innovation capital. FiP approach is based on design thinking tools and methodologies, bridging technologies and humanities for envisioning and experimenting promising innovation trajectories, within four research scapes: augmented heritage, generative anticipations, transparent processes and transmedia narratives.

Paola is a Senior Researcher with an extensive curriculum of publications, and has been Head of several European Projects, with the scope of transforming society through a design-driven, cultural approach.

Adjunct professor – Department of the Arts of the University of Bologna.
Journalist, lecturer, and curator, he deals with cultural innovation between fashion and design.

After graduating in contemporary art at the University of Bologna he has been researcher for over 15 years at Future Concept Lab, a leading institute in trend forecasting and strategic consulting.

He holds the “Fashion and Industrial Design” course at the University of Bologna (Polo di Rimini) and teaches at the Accademia Costume & Moda in Rome. He has lectured in fashion and design schools in Italy and abroad, including Politecnico di Milano, Milano Fashion Institute, Domus Academy, Istituto Marangoni, Creative Academy, SDA Bocconi, IULM, Università La Sapienza, Central Saint Martins UAL London, ECAL.

He is European editor for Cool Hunting. He also collaborates with national and international publications such as Interni, Marie Claire Maison, The Good Life, Vogue Italia, Vogue Talents, Eye Magazine.

He worked with the national Commission for the Promotion of Italian Fashion Cultureat MiBAC (Ministry of Artistic and Cultural Heritage) and he was part of the scientific committees of Milano Design Award and Brera Design Days.

Since 2018 he hosts the podcast Parola Progetto.

Vlad Tenu is a Romanian-British architect based in London.
From architectural design and teaching to art installations, sculptures, modular assembly systems and wearable art pieces, Vlad’s work is a continuous explorative research into spatiality, scale and materiality.

Inspired by underlying processes of nature, his design workflow is a symbiotic mix of art and science involving mathematical concepts and algorithmic techniques.

Vlad’s cross-disciplinary approach to design and fabrication is about reinventing the digital craft in the creation of ambitious, experiential designs: site specific sculptural installations, exhibition pavilions and pop-up display pieces, public art and private commissions, as well as creative collaborations with international brands and celebrities.

His experimental work includes award-wining pieces such as Minimal Complexity, the winner of the TEX-FAB Repeat Competition 2010 and an AIA Houston Design Award 2012. The piece was also exhibited at London Festival of Architecture 2012, London Design Festival 2012 and Sleep Hotel 2013.

Solo exhibitions include Synthetic Nature London 2013 and Glimpses of Infinite Symmetry Bucharest 2014. He was also the curator of Process – an exhibition on cutting-edge architectural designs in Shanghai in 2014.

His modular system Miniplex was exhibited in various configurations at London Festival of Architecture 2017, Plug-in-to-the-future at ARUP Phase2 Gallery London and Shenzhen Design Week 2019. Vlad’s works have also been displayed in art and technology festivals such as Unfinished 2018 and BINAR 2019 in Bucharest.

Vlad Tenu co-founded FORÆVA with fashion designer Lana Dumitru. Working in collaboration with Swarovski, they designed and produced a crystal dress made of 25,000 Swarovski crystals. The dress has been launched at Swarovski’s Brilliance Redefined exhibition in Hong Kong and worn on stage by Björk as part of her Utopia Tour 2018.
His previous fashion collaborations include head pieces and a display piece for CLON8 at Paris Fashion Week 2015 and a modular pop-up shop for Del Rio London at LeBonMarché in Paris in 2015.

Vlad Tenu studied architecture in Iasi, Lisbon and London at the Bartlett UCL, where he has been awarded a MSc. in Adaptive Architecture & Computation in 2009 and a Certificate in Advanced Architectural Research in 2010.

He has been involved in teaching at the Bartlett since 2009, initially as an assistant and currently as a dissertation technical tutor on the Architectural Computation course.

Vlad gave lectures and presentations at leading academic institutions such as the Architectural Association, Bartlett, G.D. Hines College of Architecture in Houston, Aarhus School of Architecture and Cooper Union in New York during ACADIA 2010 Conference.

Vlad Tenu also took part in various discussion panels and presented at international design events and conferences such as Shenzhen Design Week 2019, SHARE X Bucharest 2019, EUSight Talks in Shanghai 2014, Galateca Bucharest 2014, Rising Minds inaugural session at Shoreditch House 2013 and BIFE Conference in Bucharest 2012.