'Madrid Circular': IED Madrid holds sustainability conference and hackathon

From Wednesday November 15 through Friday November 17, IED Madrid will host Madrid Circular, a conference dedicated to sustainable and circular fashion, which aims to inspire the industry and the fashion world to take action and co-create innovative solutions to improve the fashion of the future.

Over the course of three days, the IED Community, including educators, current students and alumni, as well as the creative industries community in Madrid and all of Europe more broadly, can participate in different activities.

Wednesday November 15 will be the conference’s ‘inspirational day’ with an opening event that aims to contextualise sustainability at IED Madrid. On this day, a number of IED students and teachers will share their experiences and perspectives on sustainability while working on their respective professional projects.

These students and educators include: Blanca Gómara who works at Sustainability Culture, Inditex, María Giraldo from Sensitisation and Moda re-, designer Lucas Muñoz, and textile sculptor and expert in upcycling and circular strategies Alex Hug.

In addition, IED Spain's research department will share some key learnings from its participation in two current European projects related to sustainable and circular fashion: S4Fashion (EISMEA) and Hackthatfashion (Creative Europe).

Rut Turró, an expert in inclusive and accessible design, will speak about the project she carried out for S4Fashion, ‘Rethinking Labels’, a policy recommendation for accessible textile labels), together with designer Lisi Badia.

IED hosts sustainable fashion conference Madrid Circular

On the second day, the teams will work on materialising these ideas, which will be shared with all participants during ‘a day of networking and learning’, as per the press release sent out by the school.

In addition, all participants in the hackathon will receive, a gift courtesy of Modare- that will offer them a first-hand insight into circular fashion. It will consist of a visit to one of Moda re-'s plants in Valencia, Barcelona or Bilbao, to learn about the most unknown phase of the textile life cycle: where the garment is discarded by the consumer and the company gives it ‘a second life’, this way ‘preventing it from becoming waste’.

In addition, during the second and third day of Madrid Circular, the hackathon of the Hackthatfashion project will take place, in which the participants pre-selected through an open call, with the support of IED Madrid teachers, will have the opportunity to take part in a creative challenge to outline their design projects or business ideas.

The purpose of the hackathon is to teach creatives the keys for implementing sustainable and circular strategies in areas such as design, innovation in materials and processes, the product life cycle, circular business models and communication.

Those interested in the event can sign up via the school’s website.

Find the full programme for the first day, ‘Inspiration Day’ of Madrid Circular 2023 below. All times are listed in CET