The Camera Moda Fashion Trust has awarded its 2026 grants to Act N.1, Institution by Galib Gassanoff, and Materia, continuing the Italian fashion council’s commitment to nurturing emerging design talent through a combination of direct funding and structured mentorship. Each of the three winning brands will receive €70,000 in unrestricted financial support, along with business mentoring and one-on-one tutoring sessions beginning in June — a package designed to address the specific challenges that young labels face in scaling from critical acclaim to commercial sustainability.
Institution by Galib Gassanoff — a separate venture from the designer’s work with Act N.1 — represents a more experimental proposition. Launched in 2023, the label operates at the intersection of conceptual design and wearable sculpture, with collections that have drawn comparisons to the early work of Maison Margiela. The Camera Moda Fashion Trust’s backing signals institutional confidence in Gassanoff’s singular vision, providing the financial runway necessary to develop a production infrastructure capable of translating his handcrafted approach into something approaching commercial viability.
The Camera Moda Fashion Trust, established in 2017 as an Italian equivalent of the BFC Foundation or the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, has now distributed grants to 19 emerging brands across its seven cycles. The program’s structure — combining unrestricted capital with structured mentorship — addresses a well-documented gap in the emerging designer ecosystem: the availability of runway funding and editorial support far exceeds the availability of the operational capital needed to build the back-end infrastructure — pattern cutting rooms, sample archives, supply chain relationships — that transforms creative potential into business reality. In a fashion economy that increasingly demands that young brands arrive fully formed, the Trust offers something rarer than exposure: time.
Act N.1, founded by Luca Lin and Galib Gassanoff, returns to the Trust’s roster after having been an earlier beneficiary in the program’s inaugural years. The brand, known for its hybrid aesthetic that fuses Lin’s Italian heritage with Gassanoff’s Georgian roots, has carved a distinctive space in the Milan fashion landscape through collections that treat cultural hybridity as a design methodology rather than a marketing theme. The grant will support the brand’s expansion of its direct-to-consumer channel and the development of a dedicated e-commerce platform — a critical infrastructure investment for a label whose wholesale relationships have traditionally driven distribution.
Materia, the third recipient, rounds out a cohort that reads as a microcosm of contemporary Italian fashion’s strengths. Where Act N.1 and Institution operate in the realm of conceptual luxury, Materia grounds its practice in material innovation, developing proprietary fabric treatments and construction techniques that sit at the intersection of artisanal tradition and industrial possibility. The brand’s work with upcycled cashmere and biodegradable surface treatments has attracted attention from sustainability-focused retailers and textile researchers alike, positioning it as a potential supplier partner as well as a standalone label.
