Press
June 2007
“Kontakt. Fashion Award”: Erste Bank awards prize to best fashion designer from Central and Eastern Europe at the
“7 festival for fashion & photography”
For the second year, Erste Bank will award the “Kontakt. Fashion Award by Erste Bank” to a designer from Central and Eastern Europe. This year’s winner is Slobodan Mihajlovic from Serbia. Erste Bank and Unit F, who organises the Viennese festival, are connected by a long-running cooperation.
The “Kontakt. Fashion Award by Erste Bank” will be awarded to the creator of the most exceptional couture designs from Central and Eastern Europe at the Austrian Fashion Awards Night, to take place in Vienna on June 22nd, 2007. This year’s winner, Slobodan Mihajlovic form Serbia, who has been hand-picked by an international experts’ jury from a group of nominees, will receive EUR 4.000,--. In addition, his or her award-winning collection will be presented live on the catwalk on the night. The aim of the award is to increase the visibility of fashion design coming out of Central and Eastern Europe. “Kontakt. Fashion Award by Erste Bank” pays respect to the creativity of these designers and to their innovative and sophisticated pieces.
“By sponsoring the ‘Kontakt. Fasion Award’, we want to achieve one thing above all: publicity and visibility for the breathtaking fashion production coming out of CEE”, explains Boris Marte, Head of Corporate Sponsoring at Erste Bank. Marte is also the initiator of ‘Kontakt. The Arts and Civil Society Program of Erste Bank Group’. “Fashion, more than most other art forms, relates to the present and must be ‘consumed’ in the present – or else, it will go out of fashion. This is why, with the help of our ‘Kontakt. Fashion Award’, we want to bring these designers into immediate contact with the Austrian fashion scene, thereby giving them a platform for international networking and exchange”, Marte continued.
With around 16 million customers in eight countries, Erste Bank Group is one of the biggest financial service providers in the whole of Central and Eastern Europe today. Marte goes on to explain that, “For us at Erste Bank, an automatic consequence of our economic success in Central and Eastern Europe is a social responsibility for the people living there. A company with this high a profile cannot remain untouched by what is going on around it. That is why we founded ‘Kontakt’. The programme is designed to contribute substantially to the development of a diverse and lively culture landscape in CEE. We want to give the region’s people, who used to live on the margins, the opportunity to present their artistic production to the international public.
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