Alumni Laia Badia makes her debut at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Madrid with her biomaterials collection “Caducifolium”

Research, irony, and resistance. Three words that define Caducifolium, the graduate collection of Laia Badia, alumni of our Bachelor’s in Fashion Design, who this Sunday, March 19 takes to the runway at the A/W 26/27 edition of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Madrid. It will take place at EGO, the platform for emerging talent, which is celebrating its twentieth anniversary.

The collection comprises fifteen unisex looks (eight womenswear and seven menswear) built entirely from biodegradable biomaterials assembled in circular modules. The pieces can be remelted, transformed or returned to the earth, proposing a potentially continuous life cycle. As the designer herself explains: "Caducifolium is born and ages. Yet it does not die".

The circle, far from being a purely aesthetic device, is also the conceptual backbone of the collection: it represents the life cycle of the garments, which are born by hand, remade as many times as necessary and, ultimately, buried to nourish the soil. A visual language that draws on the futurism of Paco Rabanne in the 1960s, the technological experimentation of Coperni, and the geometric obsession of Yayoi Kusama, creating a language that oscillates between clothing and expanded sculpture.

A project full of #MadeInLCI talent

Caducifolium was born in the Fashion Lab at LCI Barcelona, where Laia developed the collection under the mentorship of tutors Estefanía Feu, Gabriel Torres, and Maria Costa, and with the consultancy of Estel Vilaseca, Head of the Fashion area, and lecturer Mica Clubourg. Since then, the project has been presented at the Disseny Hub Barcelona and the Barcelona Design Week, and now makes the leap to the most important showcase in Spanish fashion.

But our School's imprint goes far beyond the design process. The communications team driving the project in press and social media is made up entirely of third-year students from our Bachelor’s in Fashion Communication, coordinated by lecturer Dani Cantó:

• Partnerships: Valeria Boetsch.
• Press: Carla del Castillo and Noël Pons.
• Media: Paula Biel, Lluna Codina, Virginia Crespo, and Marina Rebanales.
• Image: Adriana Batlle, Lioba Freixas, Marta Orenga, and Julieta Harvey.

An initiative that makes the project especially meaningful: Laia's debut collection arrives at MBFW Madrid with an entire team of LCI students learning the trade from the inside, taking on real responsibilities on a professional stage of the highest level.

A defiant laugh at the system

Caducifolium does not aim to be an immediate solution, but an urgent reminder. Our alumni draws on Hannah Arendt to articulate her position: if laughter is the most efficient tool for challenging power structures, her collection is exactly that, a defiant, critical laugh in the face of a system of overproduction that leaves no room for slow rhythms, unstable materials or real cycles.

Presenting fifteen literally handmade looks on the runway, in a context where the industry produces millions of garments a month, has, as she herself puts it, "a poetic quality". And a political one too.

At LCI Barcelona we are enormously proud to see how Laia's work, courage, and vision (and that of the whole team behind her) reach one of the most important stages in national fashion and are attracting the interest of media outlets such as Expansión. Congratulations!

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