Thomas Delattre: "Emerging designers should never compromise on their creativity, their radical vision."

The Institut Français de la Mode brings together creatives and managers in a unique ecosystem that trains the industry's future key players. Thomas Delattre joined in 2015, before taking over as Director of the Fashion Entrepreneurship Centre in 2020. Whilst consolidating all entrepreneurship-related activities, he made an observation: "These programmes were perceived as exclusively 'business-oriented', reserved for management graduates. How many emerging brands are actually created by designers?" This reflection gave birth to the idea of creative entrepreneurship, which addresses all profiles of project leaders. Two programmes embody this vision: the IFM Incubator, which welcomes around twenty emerging projects each year, and the IFM Labels Accelerator, reserved for five brands in full growth. Thomas Delattre personally participates in all recruitment panels. "Alongside consultants and entrepreneurs, I ensure the final composition of the cohort. The objective is to select eclectic projects that embody fashion's renewal at a given moment, whilst identifying potential complementarities between designers, self-taught individuals, architects, engineers, managers..."

"The strength of the IFM Incubator lies in the collective it builds."

Twenty projects per year, polar opposite profiles learning to work together. "Every year I'm surprised to see opposites come together in the Incubator, beyond creative or aesthetic affinities," notes Thomas Delattre. Highly creative emerging brands, service companies, B2B or B2C projects: the Incubator welcomes self-taught individuals, designers graduated from the best schools, architects, engineers, managers, with no criteria regarding academic background or age. "We support professionals who, beyond the friendships that form, have mutual interests in working together." This internal ecosystem opens outwards: the objective is to help young creation integrate into a network built around groups and ready-to-wear brands, notably members of the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode. Ami Paris illustrates this bridge: the brand created the Entrepreneurship Prize in partnership with IFM, which rewards a project from the Incubator each year. Cachí won it in 2023, Lora Sonney in 2024, and both have presented their work at the SPHERE showroom, a Federation initiative as part of its policy to support emerging creation, alongside Victor Clavelly who also benefited from the Incubator's support. "We've succeeded in this bet on creative entrepreneurship!"

The support process involves a key step: learning to prioritise. "Designers often stack up their ideals: of course, highly creative fashion, but which they want to be local, with the best sourcing, the best manufacturing... not to mention the minimums that suppliers confront them with." The result: wholesale/retail prices that explode, a consequence of lacking initial strategic positioning. The challenge is therefore to find a balance between the theoretical project and reality, in order to then identify a viable market. "There's only one compromise I ask them not to make: their creativity. It's their weapon for standing out, and without their radical creative vision, we lose the substance that drives them."

Whilst the Incubator relies on the collective, the IFM Labels Accelerator operates according to an opposite logic. The programme addresses five brands in full growth and favours tailored support, close to a consulting format. "We target their specific needs through individual coaching," explains Thomas Delattre. However, some collective sessions are maintained because "the exchange of experiences between creative labels and ready-to-wear projects is extremely rich." He particularly remembers fruitful exchanges between Ludovic de Saint Sernin and more commercial brands in the group: "Both sides learned a great deal from each other." This year, the Accelerator supports Alain Paul, Ouest Paris and 3.Paradis, who feature on the Official Paris Fashion Week Calendar and have presented their collections at the SPHERE showroom.

This logic of complementarity also permeates IFM's entire pedagogy, where fashion design and management students mix rather than operate in silos. Alongside their main courses, around forty students even follow an entrepreneurship awareness programme to discover and connect with these designers.

"Supported by the World Bank, we collectively met the players shaping Beninese fashion."

This support methodology has also been deployed beyond the walls of IFM. The Fashion Entrepreneurship Centre leads the FLY (Fashion Led by Youth) incubation programme in Benin alongside Sèmè City. "This programme was created at the request of Sèmè City, so the essence of the programme is local," specifies Thomas Delattre. "The multiple exchanges with the various stakeholders brought to light specific needs to support emerging Beninese brands." The programme was thus built around a clear mission: to protect and enhance the creativity of local designers, whilst offering them commercial development prospects at the scale desired by each project leader. "Whether their ambition is national, regional or even global, the programme's experts adapt to each vision." An approach that encapsulates the Fashion Entrepreneurship Centre's method: to structure without restraining, to support in order to reveal.

Reuben Attia