The walls in fashion between traditional and digital/web3 are crumbling, with a helping hand from seasoned executives like Ashumi Sangavi—chief executive officer and founder of Future+ and MAD Global.

Sangavi started off in publishing at Conde Nast International over 20 years ago, entering at the ground level where she quickly learned the editorial business. She worked primarily for the international Vogue titles before settling in on Conde Nast International’s advertising business.

“That brought me to London around 15 years ago, where I was in the early days of e-commerce and social media,” Sangavi said to me during a recent interview. “I was always interested in exploring how those industries were affecting culture and also how brands were starting to lean into that space and learn how to use social tools to talk to audiences in new and different ways.”

Sangavi launched her innovation agency MAD Global in late 2009, and while the company is very much still up and running, the type of work it conducts is slightly different from when it first started.

“We started off working with fashion, beauty and retail clients to service them and produce mostly print ad campaigns, adding on the digital content layer side—and subsequently—immersive and experiential events,” Sangavi said. “We’ve always been about pushing boundaries on how content is not only produced but consumed, and the tools we’re moving into that blur the physical and digital worlds.”

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While for many within the industry there’s a strict distinction between digital and high-end, Sangavi is hoping to show it’s not so much a distinction as an evolution. The advent of couture digital fashion brands like DRAUP and other companies like Sangavi’s MAD Global are helping bridge the gap for fashion brands and designers converging on the blockchain space.

Sangavi now tends to push her clients into experimenting with new immersive technologies. Since 2014, she’s worked with holograms and produced holographic shows for partners like Burberry, Fendi and Christian Louboutin.

“Those technologies are having a bit of a resurgence,” Sangavi said. “As the saying goes, ‘innovation is just how you apply an existing invention to a new use case,’ and that’s what we’re really in the business of doing. Web3 and blockchain are just smaller slices in terms of the broad spectrum of innovation we work across and all of the technologies we sort of play with.”

The company will be immersed in Digital Fashion Week this week in London alongside David Cash—founder of Cash Labs—and will be conducting holographic fashion shows and runways in London, Paris and Singapore.

For Digital Fashion Week, Sangavi is not just showcasing digital fashion designers and fashion creators, but also how traditional brands can use web3 platforms to highlight how their branding can be reimagined.

“I entered crypto in 2018-2019, which connected me to early stage investors and founders who were building at a grassroots level and are now quite prolific projects that have proliferated the culture of where blockchain exists,” Sangavi said. “For me, it’s always been about finding different ways to connect people and I started to see this white space emerge, which was the genesis of why I started my second company, Future+.”

Future+ is a curated membership platform that connects founders, visionaries and disruptors across mostly the creative industries, but also culture, technology and web3. The company hosts global events at events throughout the year such as SXSW and VivaTech.

Because the company is a digital membership without a physical location, their service provides people the ability to come together and forge connections in real life. It’s a shift from people experiencing art, culture and fashion in a static way to desiring engagement on a deeper, more interactive level with content and art.

“We’re living in a time of peak social media, and I think the more people expose themselves to social media, the more inherently lonely they become in some sense,” she said. “We want to disrupt that, not just from a social angle, but from a B2B professional angle as well. Hopefully for the first time people will have ownership over not just their content and identity, but how they actually connect with people in a way that feels more synchronous to what they’re building toward.”

lead image: Ashumi Sangavi