ELLE ✧ ELLE Woman Awards Nominee Nataliya Grimberg

ELLE Woman Awards Visionary Interview

A fashion futurist who organized the first ever virtual reality avatar fashion week in history, Nataliya Grimberg was nominated in the Vision category at the ELLE Women Awards.

She was born in Kazakhstan, where she also spent a significant part of her childhood. “My mother is an interior designer, but originally studied physics. She showed me how to combine aesthetics with technological understanding, and shaped my own artistic and scientific ambitions,” explains Nataliya. In the Czech Republic, she first studied at the Fashion Design Studio under the leadership of Pavel Ivančice at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, but her educational journey had only just begun there. She received her MBA in Fashion Technology in Paris, studied business in the USA, and went on internships in London, Scotland, and Madrid. As part of the Fashion.stl project, she created one of the first 3D printed fashion collections. Then she became fascinated by artificial intelligence and began programming her own AI tool for generating prints. She presented the resulting collection at the We're Next Prague show. "This was followed by fashion collections and experiments involving augmented and virtual reality, video mapping on clothing and 'phygital' (a cross between the words 'physical' and 'digital', ed.) fashion shows. At MBPFW I then presented the first dress with AR technology powered by artificial intelligence.

" We can, for example, digitize historical pieces of clothing that would otherwise just hang in museums. "

Last year I was the selected designer for the inaugural AI Fashion Week in New York," she lists. Her first job was a trend forecaster position at the London agency Unique Style Platform, where she predicted trends not only in the fashion industry, but also in the wider spectrum of culture and technology. Currently, she spends a lot of time at conferences around the world, but she also consults on innovations for various projects and brands. For example, for the Czech virtual world platform Somnium Space, where she created the first ever Metaverse Fashion Week of avatars in history. "I am a supporter of augmented reality. Our physical world is beautiful and I don't want to leave it completely for the virtual. But when we make the physical world special with AR, that's the most interesting version of the future."  

You can find out about all the nominated women in the February 2024 ELLE issue or at ellewomenawards.elle.cz