LDCxTechstyler: Meet The Panelists Redefining Luxury

Our Redefining Luxury event is fast approaching over the London Fashion Week. We have teamed up with Techstyler to form a panel of experts who will explore the key innovations in the industry, reveal the pioneers on the cutting edge of sustainable fashion and discuss how we can all help move towards a more circular and sustainable future. Here at LDC we are very excited for this event and can't wait to welcome the amazing panelist to our LFW store on 18th February. 

Meet the panelists below and the woman leading the charge! Join the discussion on Monday 18th February from 6pm, at 59 Greek Street Soho.

Brooke Roberts-Islam is an award winning knitwear designer who specialises in textile innovation. She is the woman behind Techstyler, a blog that provides and opinion and shares interviews from the crossroads of fashion-technology from a fashion designer’s perspective. Brooke also writes for the Huffington Post about fashion-tech. She co-owns The Brooke Roberts Innovation Agency (BRIA) which creates material and tech collaborations, products and installations with brands from the fashion and technology sectors, she combines what she knows about the latest technology innovations with developing new materials. The BRIA innovates technology-led solutions to match clients’ ideas, liaising with materials scientists and industry experts to bring these solutions to the prototyping stage and beyond. 

The Techstyler panel will consist of Maghan McDowell, the Innovation Editor of Vogue Business’s brand new Innovation Section; Kerry Murphy, founder of The Fabricant; Helene Steiner, co-founder and director of Open Cell; and Livia van Heerde, sustainable lifestyle influencer.

Maghan McDowell, Innovation Editor at Vogue Business                                    Maghan has had quite the impressive career and recently moved to London all the way from San Francisco to head up the new innovation sector at Vogue, where she will cover the future of the global fashion industry. Maghan was WWD’s first technology reporter and has been the editorial director for the San Francisco chronicle, writing articles on style and culture. Her work has also appeared in Business of Fashion, Marie Claire, Glossy and W and covered a huge range of topics from technology to cannabis, to culture and dating. She has lectured at University of Florida’s College of Journalism and the Academy of Art University’s School of Fashion discussing fashion journalism and magazine media.

Kerry Murphy, Founder the Fabricant

The Fabricant is a digital fashion house leading the industry towards a new sector of digital only clothing. They use 3D animation software, body scanning and tools from the visual effects industry, to produce hyper-real digital fashion experiences.

The fashion future the Fabricant foresees is one of collaboration, creativity and co-operation. By opening up fashion onto a digital platform it removes some of the exclusive platforms that preexist it in a material sense. It becomes open to everyone rather than by invitation only. Allowing for equal representation, by digitally releasing their designs, people can come to realise their digital identity, whichever way they choose, and can express who they are, how they wish to be perceived, or what they want to become. 

Helene Steiner, Co-Founder Open Cell

Helene is a designer and engineer who works at the interface between technology and science. She co-founded Open Cell which provides affordable work space for early stage biotech companies that combine design with biology. ‘Bio-interfaces’ is the next frontier towards a more intuitive, intelligent hybrid practice that reaches across disciplines and fields to create seamless, sustainable, beautiful and intelligent technologies that will take us into the next century. Helene is also the co-founder of her own bio-tech company, Cell-Free Technology, where she focuses on computational and biological design tools for proteins and materials that the biomaterial platform at the fashion department at the Royal College of Art.

Livia van Heerde, Sustainability Blogger

Livia is a student in London majoring in Environmental Science. Alongside her studies she writes a blog on her sustainable, ethical and vegan lifestyle. She covers all sorts of topics from fashion to human rights and the environment. Livia started her blog when she realised that typically, the fashion industry does not reflect her views on conscious fashion. All of the products Livia mentions on her blog are vegan, eco-friendly/ chemical free and support small brands. Livia aims to prove to her readers that ethically-made fashion can be easily accessed and doesn’t mean having to forfeit style.