When support meets ambition – the Start Scholarships Fashion 2024 on stage
This year, the Austrian Fashion Awards 2025 spotlight designers who in 2024 benefitted from the Start Scholarships Fashion of the BMKMS (administered via the Austrian Fashion Association). Erifyli Garoufalia, GATTO, Julian Schock, Sans Contrefaçons, and Pouran Parvizi represent voices of a generation where identity, sustainability, and interdisciplinary thought converge in clothing.
Though the city’s Fashion Award and the outstanding artist award for experimental fashion will be revealed on gala night, these five grantees already signal a potent future.
Shared Threads: What Defines These Talents
Cultural narratives meet design
Erifyli Garoufalia fuses her Greek heritage with urban sensibilities. Between latex and linen, her designs trace the tensions and harmonies of origin and belonging.
Rebellion, collective, sustainable
GATTO, led by Olivia Lottersberger and Sydney Floyd, merges punk, folklore, and performance. Their upcycled, community-driven work sighs resistance and self-determination.
Clothing as theater
Julian Schock navigates the border of costume and couture, where garments become expressive gestures of queerness, emotion and movement.
Reframing masculinity
Sans Contrefaçons by Jun Takeuchi reimagines men’s wear with fluid gestures, subversive drapery and a boundary-blurring sensibility between Tokyo and Vienna.
Political intimacy
Based in Vienna, Pouran Parvizi treats fashion as quiet protest, as soft architecture of vulnerability, identity, and transformation.
The Engine: Start Scholarships Fashion
The Start Scholarships Fashion (BMWKMS / BMKÖS) award five designers annually, each receiving €9,000 over six months to fund independent projects.
At least two scholarships target “Societal Challenges” — proposals that intersect fashion with the UN’s SDGs, from circular systems to social innovation.
Applications run via the Austrian Fashion Association (AFA), evaluated by international jurors for artistic excellence, conceptual strength, and sustainability.
Significance & Forward Motion
By placing these grantees center-stage, the Austrian Fashion Awards does more than honor talent — it fosters dialogue. This generation designs not only garments but narratives, critiques and alternative forms of belonging.
These five voices are not anomalies — they expand fashion’s grammar. They show us that questions of ethics, identity and ecology now are the clothes we wear.
