Menu
Foræva is about two designers taking the past into the future through reinventing the ancestral heritage. Fashion designer Lana Dumitru and architect Vlad Tenu have teamed up to reimagine tradition for the next space age.
From cells to bodies, planets or galaxies, we’re composed of endless recurring patterns: atoms following a certain dance on the rhythms of Nature.
FORÆVA is a multi-disciplinary design lab co-founded by fashion designer Lana Dumitru & architect Vlad Tenu. The fusion between their fields is expanded by their common interest in expressing ideas through artistic means, drawing inspiration from nature, traditional craft, computation, science and technology.
Their innovative design approach covers a wide area of expertise in fashion, jewellery, product design and architecture often materialised in art pieces and collections born out of research projects, comissions and brand collaborations. Their successful collaboration with Swarovski reinforces the studio’s ethos and mission to reinvent digital craft, push boundaries and challenge perceptions of the future of tradition. The Foræva crystal dress is made of 25,000 Swarovski crystals, was worn by Björk on stage as part of Utopia Tour and it is currently exhibited at the Swarovski Crystal Worlds Museum in Austria.
Lana Dumitru is a designer and digital artist awarded by Forbes with “the best young Romanian fashion designer” award. Her eponymous label and design studio is currently based in Lisbon.
Lana has finished her research in London and earned a PhD in Digital Arts and Fashion.
You can consider LD an artist manifesting her beliefs through design and fashion as you would find Lana’s clothing in an art gallery or in a museum but also in a shop.
Her original style comes from the fact that she designs all her visuals and patterns, transforming pure white fabrics into strong unique conceptual pieces through the means of digital printing, laser cutting and digital prototyping. The Lana Dumitru Design Studio is collaborating for more than 10 years with other brands, companies, doing bespoke and commissioned work, artistic collaborations, textile design, new media, digital design and so on.
Lana is the first Romanian designer to oficially collaborate with Puma in a custom print jacket coined “T7 Etno Shake Puma by Lana” and with many other international brands and companies.
She was included by Forbes in Top 30 under 30 entrepreneurs and her work has been showcased at London Fashion Week/International Fashion Showcase, Strasbourg Fashion Week, Holon Design Museum, Kalmar Art Museum and Malmö Design Centre Sweden, Salone del Mobile Milano, Horniman Museum London, National Village Museum Bucharest, Cultural Institutes, Art Galleries, Design Weeks around the world and more.
In 2017, Lana co-founded the brand Foræva together with architect Vlad Tenu, dressing artists like Bjork and working with brands like Swarovski International.
With many collections in her portfolio which have consisted, until now, in “wearable opinions”- as she describes her clothes- Lana has won the jury’s appreciation in various design competitions: Puma Creativity Award, Pasarela/Institut Francais de la Mode contest finalist, Elle Decoration- Design of the year nominee- Lana for Photoliu, Young Creative Chevrolet Award-Romania, product design awards, etc. and added to her credentials the quality of being a previous member of the digital design team for Mary Katrantzou in London.
Newspapers and magazines like Vogue, New York Times, La Repubblica etc. published her works.
Vlad Tenu is a Romanian-British architect based in London. From architectural design and teaching to art installations, sculptures, modular assembly systems and wearable art pieces, Vlad’s work is a continuous explorative research into spatiality, scale and materiality. Inspired by underlying processes of nature, his design workflow is a symbiotic mix of art and science involving mathematical concepts and algorithmic techniques. Vlad’s cross-disciplinary approach to design and fabrication is about reinventing the digital craft in the creation of ambitious, experiential designs: site specific sculptural installations, exhibition pavilions and pop-up display pieces, public art and private commissions, as well as creative collaborations with international brands and celebrities.
ART & DESIGN
His experimental work includes award-wining pieces such as Minimal Complexity, the winner of the TEX-FAB Repeat Competition 2010 and an AIA Houston Design Award 2012. The piece was also exhibited at London Festival of Architecture 2012, London Design Festival 2012 and Sleep Hotel 2013. Solo exhibitions include Synthetic Nature London 2013 and Glimpses of Infinite Symmetry Bucharest 2014. He was also the curator of Process – an exhibition on cutting-edge architectural designs in Shanghai in 2014. His modular system Miniplex was exhibited in various configurations at London Festival of Architecture 2017, Plug-in-to-the-future at ARUP Phase2 Gallery London and Shenzhen Design Week 2019. Vlad’s works have also been displayed in art and technology festivals such as Unfinished 2018 and BINAR 2019 in Bucharest.
WEARABLE ART & FASHION
Vlad Tenu co-founded FORÆVA with fashion designer Lana Dumitru. Working in collaboration with Swarovski, they designed and produced a crystal dress made of 25,000 Swarovski crystals. The dress has been launched at Swarovski’s Brilliance Redefined exhibition in Hong Kong and worn on stage by Björk as part of her Utopia Tour 2018. Their latest 3D printed textile collection in collaboration with Stratasys was exhibited at Milan Design Week in 2022. His previous fashion collaborations include head pieces and a display piece for CLON8 at Paris Fashion Week 2015 and a modular pop-up shop for Del Rio London at LeBonMarché in Paris in 2015.
ACADEMIA & TEACHING
Vlad Tenu studied architecture in Iasi, Lisbon and London at the Bartlett UCL, where he has been awarded a MSc. in Adaptive Architecture & Computation in 2009 and a Certificate in Advanced Architectural Research in 2010. He has been involved in teaching at the Bartlett since 2009, as an assistant and dissertation technical tutor on the Architectural Computation course. Vlad gave lectures and presentations at leading academic institutions such as the Architectural Association, Bartlett, G.D. Hines College of Architecture in Houston, Aarhus School of Architecture and Cooper Union in New York during ACADIA 2010 Conference. Vlad Tenu also took part in various discussion panels and presented at international design events and conferences such as Shenzhen Design Week 2019, SHARE X Bucharest 2019, EUSight Talks in Shanghai 2014, Galateca Bucharest 2014, Rising Minds inaugural session at Shoreditch House 2013 and BIFE Conference in Bucharest 2012.
ARCHITECTURE
Vlad is an ARB/OAR registered architect. His architectural experience includes working with award winning studios such as Surface Architects, Urban Systems and currently as an associate with the Sterling Prize Winner practice Allford Hall Monaghan Morris.
