Credits: The Fabricant Akriti Awatwani is a fashion designer from India who recently completed her Master's in Fashion Designing and Technology at Istituto Marangoni, Milan. Her practice is defined by a commitment to pushing fashion beyond traditional boundaries — through structure, emotion, and digital creativity. Her collections are built on minimal yet experimental silhouettes, where construction, space, and storytelling are not supporting elements but central to the design itself. For her Design Forward 26 submission, Akriti used The Fabricant platform to digitally create and develop her collection. The platform gave her the freedom to experiment with silhouettes, materials, and overall visualisation without being constrained by the limitations of physical production at the concept stage. The creative flexibility it offered allowed her to push ideas further and explore directions that physical sampling would have made impractical. Credits: The Fabricant Credits: The Fabricant Akriti sees AI as a tool that opens up an entirely new way of thinking and making. It allows her to visualise ideas faster and experiment more freely — while keeping her own creative direction firmly at the centre of the process. She is particularly drawn to AI's potential to reduce unnecessary pre-production and sampling, envisioning a future where design development happens digitally before any physical pieces are made. For her own brand, this represents a meaningful path toward a more sustainable and intentional approach to fashion. Looking to the future, Akriti believes AI will become an integral part of fashion — especially in concept development, visualisation, and experimentation…
