We Started With a Dream.
We Are Becoming a Movement.
Fashionnovation is a platform born inside one university's walls and grown into a global conversation about fashion, innovation and sustainability.
A Second-Year Student.
A Problem Nobody Else Would Solve.
In 2018, the Department of Textile Fashion and Design at Bangladesh University of Textiles (BUTEX) was home to some of the most creative young minds in the country. They could sketch, drape, illustrate and design with genuine brilliance. But there was nowhere for them to express it. No platform. No competitions. No community. Their creativity was quietly dying in classrooms that never gave it room to breathe.
One student could not accept that. Kazi Farhan Hossain Purba — then only in his second year, Batch 43 of the TFD Department — refused to wait for someone else to fix it. He began talking to his classmates, then to his mentors: Dr. Abbas Uddin Shiyak, Associate Professor of Dyes and Chemical Engineering, and Md. Mahamudul Hasan, Head of the Department. Every conversation ended the same way — with encouragement and a simple question: when do we start?
The answer was July 7, 2018. With no budget, no precedent, and nothing but ambition and belief, Kazi Purba launched Fashionnovation's first event — a fashion knowledge quiz competition named Fashioknowledge Fiesta. It was the first fashion-based quiz competition ever held at BUTEX. Many argue it was the first of its kind in Bangladesh.
Six teams. Thirty passionate students. One idea that refused to stay small. Fashionnovation had begun.
From One Quiz Competition
To a National Platform
What began in a university corridor quickly became something none of them had predicted. Each milestone arrived not because it was planned on a spreadsheet — but because a need existed, someone noticed it, and Fashionnovation stepped in to fill it.
Fashioknowledge Fiesta — The First Spark
The first ever fashion knowledge quiz competition at BUTEX. Six teams, thirty passionate participants, a new era of creative extracurricular life. Team Applique won the inaugural edition in a memorable final. A standard was set that had never existed before — at BUTEX, and possibly in Bangladesh.
Ronger Jadukor — Bangladesh's First Digital Wall Magazine at a Textile University
Fashion students are not only creative with their hands — they are gifted writers, poets and storytellers. Nobody had given them a place to prove it. Kazi Purba funded it himself from money earned through feature writing, and published Ronger Jadukor (The Magician of Colours) — the first digital wall magazine of its kind at BUTEX. Stories, poems, illustrations and essays by TFD students filled its pages.
Fashioknowledge Fiesta 2.0 + Beyond BUTEX
When COVID-19 shut everything down, Fashionnovation refused to stop. Fashioknowledge Fiesta 2.0 became the first online intradepartmental fashion quiz in BUTEX's history. Then Fashionnovation launched a full online textile printing course — and for the first time, students from Chittagong University, Jahangirnagar University, Mawlana Bhashani Science and Technology University, and BUFT joined. Fashionnovation had crossed its first wall.
IOBE Partnership — First Institutional Recognition
The International Organization for Business and Engineering (IOBE) signed a formal Memorandum of Understanding with Fashionnovation — providing grant funding, consultation and innovation centre support. It was Fashionnovation's first institutional validation from the world outside BUTEX.
fashionnovation.com — A Global Platform Goes Live
Fashionnovation transformed from a campus organisation into a global fashion education and content platform — publishing expert guides on fashion design, sustainable fashion, careers, trends and the business of fashion, reaching readers across Bangladesh and the world.
London, Helsinki, Tallinn, Stockholm — A Year of Global Exposure
Kazi Purba attended the H&M Foundation's Global Change Award Changemaker Week 1 in London (May 2025) and Changemaker Week 2 in Sweden — alongside visits to Finland and Estonia — gaining direct exposure to the world's leading fashion sustainability innovators, institutions and changemakers. Four countries. One extraordinary chapter of global immersion.
A Teacher's Winning Idea.
A Student Who Helped Carry It to the World Stage.
The H&M Foundation's Global Change Award is one of the most prestigious innovation challenges on the planet — widely known as the Nobel Prize of Fashion. It supports early-stage ideas with the power to decarbonise the global textile and fashion industry, and its annual award ceremony is held at Stockholm City Hall, the very venue where the Nobel Prize itself is awarded.
In 2025, Dr. Mohammad Abbas Uddin Shiyak — Associate Professor of Dyes and Chemical Engineering at BUTEX, and one of the original mentors of Fashionnovation — won the award for his Decarbonization Lab for Textile Process Innovation, a dedicated research initiative focused on low-emission dyeing, finishing and material treatment in textile manufacturing.
Kazi Farhan Hossain Purba, as a close associate and active member of the Decarbonization Lab, contributed to the idea conceptualisation at the proposal phase — working alongside Dr. Abbas to shape the narrative, scope and vision of the submission. When the idea was selected and the award confirmed, Kazi Purba accompanied Dr. Abbas to Changemaker Week 1 in London (18–23 May 2025) — a global gathering of fashion's most ambitious innovators — and subsequently to Changemaker Week 2 in Sweden, where they stood together at Stockholm City Hall as the Global Change Award was formally received.
From those weeks in London and Stockholm, Kazi Purba continued his journey across Europe — visiting Finland and Estonia — deepening his exposure to global fashion, textile innovation and sustainability ecosystems. Four countries in one year. A perspective that now flows directly back into every piece of work Fashionnovation produces for its readers.
This is what the connection between mentor and student looks like when it is built on genuine shared purpose — Dr. Abbas with the scientific breakthrough, Kazi Purba carrying its story forward, and both of them taking Bangladesh's fashion innovation capability to the most prestigious stage in the world.
Fashion Has the Power
To Change Everything.
Fashionnovation was born from a simple, radical belief: that fashion is not shallow. It is knowledge. It is a cultural force. An economic engine. And one of the most powerful levers for environmental change on the planet. The students of Bangladesh University of Textiles understood this instinctively. Fashionnovation gave them the tools to act on it.
Fast fashion's devastating impact on people and the environment has always been at the heart of our motivation. Bangladesh sits at the centre of the global garment industry — the choices made here ripple across the world. We believe the next generation of fashion professionals from Bangladesh will not just participate in that industry. They will lead its transformation.
That is why everything Fashionnovation does — every article, every guide, every competition, every course — is built around three commitments: knowledge, sustainability, and community.
First in BUTEX History
The first fashion knowledge quiz competition and the first digital wall magazine ever held at Bangladesh University of Textiles — creating entirely new creative spaces where none existed before.
Six Universities, One Platform
Within two years of founding, Fashionnovation had expanded beyond BUTEX to include students from Chittagong University, Jahangirnagar University, MBSTU, and BGMEA University of Fashion and Technology.
Institutional Recognition
Formal MoU with the International Organization for Business and Engineering (IOBE), providing grant funding and innovation support. Media partner of BUTEX Career Club.
Sustainability at the Core
From advocating slow fashion in our content to contributing to a Nobel Prize-level decarbonisation innovation — sustainability is not Fashionnovation's theme. It is our foundation.
350+ Published Articles
Our founder has contributed over 350 articles to national dailies including Kaler Kantho, Samakal and The Daily Sun, and to industry publications including Textile Today — covering science, innovation, fashion and technology.
Four Countries, One Year
London · Stockholm · Helsinki · Tallinn — a year of global immersion alongside one of Bangladesh's leading textile innovation researchers, absorbing the world's best thinking on sustainable fashion firsthand.
Kazi Farhan Hossain Purba
Kazi Farhan Hossain Purba is a textile engineer, sustainability professional, writer, public speaker and the founder and president of Fashionnovation. A graduate of the Department of Textile Fashion and Design at Bangladesh University of Textiles (BUTEX), he began building Fashionnovation while still a second-year student — before he had funding, before he had precedent, before anyone had done anything like it before him.
His professional life spans the full breadth of the fashion and textile world. As a Sustainability Engineer at Reed Consulting Bangladesh, he has worked on ZDHC Chemical Mapping and developed e-learning content for GIZ's chemical management training programmes in collaboration with Beuth University of Applied Sciences. At Textile Today, he served as Research Executive — contributing over 100 articles and conducting interviews with senior management at more than 20 factories.
As a writer, he has contributed over 350 articles and stories to Bangladesh's most respected national dailies — Kaler Kantho, Samakal and The Daily Sun — covering science, technology, study guides and interviews. He is a certified public speaker and a recognised youth leader in Bangladesh's fashion and textile community.
In 2025, he contributed to the idea conceptualisation of the Global Change Award-winning Decarbonization Lab for Textile Process Innovation, alongside his mentor Dr. Mohammad Abbas Uddin Shiyak. He attended Changemaker Week in London and the award ceremony in Stockholm — then extended his European journey through Finland and Estonia, building a first-hand understanding of global sustainability ecosystems that now informs every direction Fashionnovation takes.
Uniting Fashion Institutes.
Changing the Industry.
Fashionnovation is not finished. It is, by any honest measure, just beginning.
Our vision is to unite all the fashion institutes of Bangladesh — and eventually, of the world — into a single, energised network of knowledge-sharing, collaboration and creative ambition. A community where a student in Chittagong can learn from a designer in Dhaka, where a textile engineer in Bangladesh can connect with an innovator in Stockholm, where the gap between fashion education and global industry practice closes permanently.
We are building toward sustainable fashion products using natural dyes and natural resources — a living proof of concept that ethical, beautiful fashion can be made in Bangladesh for the world. We are creating content that educates and inspires the next generation of fashion professionals across borders and languages.
And we are doing it from a place of deep conviction: that the students of Bangladesh's fashion and textile departments are not just capable of participating in the global fashion industry. They are capable of leading its transformation.
Fashionnovation exists to make sure the world knows it.
Our Mission
To spread light through fashion and innovation — by educating, connecting and empowering the next generation of fashion professionals in Bangladesh and across the world, with sustainability, creativity and knowledge as our guides.