The British Fashion Council have announced today that the UK’s most glittering fashion awards ceremony is about to go interstellar. Losing the team GB prefix, The Fashion Awards 2016 will celebrate fashion industry talent from around the globe, with the ceremony itself getting a makeover fit for the world-stage.
“We aspire to create an event that is like a mix of the Academy Awards and the Met Ball, on a global scale,” BFC chairman Natalie Massenet told BoF in an interview hosted at the awards’ prestigious new venue, west London’s Royal Albert Hall. “It’s going to be the most sweeping, beautiful, magical, sparkly, twinkly, elegant red carpet you’ve ever seen,” she enthuses.
The event will not only be an awards presentation, but, like the Met Ball in New York, it will also function as a fundraiser. Tickets for tables at the event will be available to the public from 3 May, and all funds raised will go to the BFC’s Education Foundation, with hopes of raising £10 million over the next 10 years to fund scholarships to ensure the most talented students may attend the best fashion colleges despite high fees and government cuts.
Massenet explains to BoF that it was the BFC’s ambassador for emerging talent and i-D contributor Sarah Mower who flagged four years ago that the industry has “a potential crisis on its hands”. Mower was concerned that “people like an Alexander McQueen, who had a scholarship to go to school, will not emerge and that that we will lose some of the diversity, some of the left-field thinking, the anti-establishment that the fashion industry craves and needs,” Massenet says. A number of lucky students will also be invited to the inaugural Fashion Awards, hosted on 5 December.
Tickets for The Fashion Awards will be on sale from the 3 May at: www.fashionawards.com/tickets
Credits
Text Charlotte Gush
Photography Mike Marsland, British Fashion Council