• Fashion, with its continual yearning for the future, is perhaps inherently utopic. Designers often hold up a mirror to collective dreams showing how they might take shape. They act as commentators and innovators as well as dreamers, taking a pivotal role in imagining and creating change. IFS provides opportunities for designers like these to engage with the UK fashion community and to build international connections, paving the way towards future creative and commercial collaborations.

  A series of seminars, visits and mentoring opportunities, organised by London College of Fashion, will help designers prepare for the showcase. The Designer Support Programme will bring together a network of LCF affiliated academics and researchers, to offer mentoring opportunities and business development during IFS. A collaboration with Fashion Scout will offer designers involved in IFS the opportunity to show their work on the catwalk. Time Out London join as event partners for a Friday Late on 19 February, an evening of fashion, music, performance and activities going behind the scenes of Fashion Utopias. Direct Drive TV & Inition will be capturing the exhibition as a Virtual Reality experience and Unmade are collaborating with 6 IFS designers to launch a collection of knitwear using their revolutionary technology.

  A prize-giving ceremony on 21 February during London Fashion Week, chaired by a panel of industry experts, will announce a winning Country and Designer, as well as a Curator Award sponsored by Bonaveri. The Award is designed by Yunus and Eliza, participants in the BFC Rock Vault initiative. The panel is headed by Sarah Mower MBE, BFC Ambassador for Emerging Talent and Chief Critic at Voguerunway.com.

• Sarah said: “At a time when it often seems as if we’ve plunged into a dystopian age, it’s a liberating act to think about exactly the opposite: if we could create a Utopia, how would we want it to be? The theme set for the fifth International Fashion Showcase will bring the optimistic visions of over 80 emerging designers of 24 countries to London – a capital known for holding up the ideas of aspiring fashion talent as pre-eminent. From the entries we’ve already seen, this year’s showcase will be a chance to witness a phenomenally uplifting inter-cultural compare-and-contrast. Each country’s deeply- felt exhibit is also to be framed with a national curator, a fast-developing field of collaboration on the frontiers between art and fashion. The installations, which for the first time are to be set in the beautiful surroundings of Somerset House, promise to give a flash-forward to the possibilities of multiple happier futures. Prizes will be awarded for both designers and curators, and we expect to see the beginnings of many careers starting right here, in London Fashion Week.”

  Over the course of the exhibition there will be programme of events open to the public. For more information visit: design.britishcouncil.org/ifs2016

19 – 23 February 2016 at West Wing, Somerset House, London 

design.britishcouncil.org/ifs2016 

#IFS2016