Maison/0 for regenerative luxury: Central Saint Martins and LVMH deepen their alliance to respond to the environmental emergency and mobilize emerging talents, through creative education.
For Earth Day 2021, Central Saint Martins, a world-renowned arts and design college based in London, and LVMH, the leader in luxury, launched “Maison/0 for regenerative luxury”. Its main goal is to harness the power of collaboration between talents from different backgrounds to design a better, more sustainable future. From addressing global warming to protecting biodiversity, this partnership will inspire and encourage students in their projects through creative education.
This partnership offers a multidisciplinary scheme for the next five years through five pillars:
1. LVMH Scholarships: supporting creative and environmentally-engaged artists, designers, and makers.
2. R&D for LVMH’s LIFE 360 environmental programme: prototyping regenerative luxury through design research, in line with the LVMH environmental strategy, LIFE 360 tackling biodiversity, circularity, and transparency.
3. Disruptive Curriculum: to inspire and educate the next generation of creative talents on the challenges of the biodiversity footprint and also to put action plans in place, notably through regenerative agriculture.
4. The Challenge Fund: nurturing an ongoing dialogue between LVMH and Central Saint Martins students and graduates to generate new ideas to respond to environmental issues with pioneering practices in terms of sustainable innovation.
5. Two Maison/0 Awards: the “Green Trail” highlights the best nature-positive graduating projects across design disciplines and for 2021, “This Earth Awards” celebrate the power of artistic practice to advocate for nature with the Art programme.
This is a new phase of a long-lasting partnership with Central Saint Martins.
LVMH has been partnering with Central Saint Martins since 2011, across a variety of initiatives to build bridges between the professional and academic worlds. The purpose of this collaboration was already to inspire and educate tomorrow’s young talents about sustainable development in the luxury industry. During the first year of the partnership, five scholarships, called “LVMH Grand Prix Scholarships”, were created to award top students, and the Lecture Theater, a multi-purpose space in the heart of the school that hosts a wide range of events and conferences, has been named in tribute to LVMH.
In 2017 a new partnership was launched on “Sustainability & Innovation in Luxury | Fostering Creativity”, with the ambition to promote young talents’ creativity and give them the means to imagine new solutions to face the environmental emergency in the luxury sector.
The Maison/0 grew out of this ambition. Its name evokes “version 0” of prototypes, to express the common objective to innovate from scratch and rethink models. This initiative showcases ways in which design can be a powerful agent for sustainable innovation.