What is the DNA of style online? How do we share our taste? And what does it mean for fashion e-commerce? Yuli Ziv, moderator at the DLD Moscow digital fashion panel “How Taste and Style Go Social,” has a platform for independent online fashion publishers. At Style Coalition, she helps brands, designers and agencies communicate, market and connect with fans through their passionate community.

How do other great fashionistas do it?

The latest hit is trying on clothes virtually via your webcam using augmented reality technology. Elena Silenok, the founder and CEO of Clothia has brought it to perfection. Clothia, she assures, is a fashionista’s dream: an online destination where you can “mix and match outfits and share looks you love.”

Also Shauna Mei is a hunter for creativity. She founded AHAlife, an online shopping destination for gifts and unique finds. “Fashion products inspire us,” the company’s founder and CEO says on stage. With AHAlife, Mei disrupts the luxury industry and intends to bring the global “AHA” expression into the digital fashion world. On her site, curators like Mei give advice in what of all those beautiful lifestyle products (e.g. Marchesa) suit us. “We also have a physical store in Beverly Hills, an e-commerce project with an offline approach.”

It’s about this blend between physical shopping, trying on a dress in a store, and receiving expert and personally suited information through new technology. The fashionistas are sure, ”the future of fashion is mobile!”

@DLDconference “Sneak peek into the @Yandex headquarters! ‪#dldmoscow‬ afternoon tour with the last standing participants ;)”

@dominik_johnson photos

Itay Talgam shakes up the crowd in the last session of this first DLD Moscow day.

To Talgam, ignorance is bliss. His presentation “The Ignorant Maestro” takes a look on how the teacher - or maestro - must allow himself to become ignorant to truly project his ideas. He must engage in a dialogue with his subject and “surrender himself completely to the cause of education,” Talgam said.

It’s a process that requieres a level playing field, and above all, courage. To demonstrate, he turned to the audience and even attempted to conduct the first few notes of “The Barber of Seville.”

“The Ignorant Maestro” takes music and its greatest conductors as its point of departure. But its morale of engagement will surely stay with the partipants as they move on to other walks of life. 

“Once people truly believe that you are with them, you can teach in a dialogue. It’s a dive into the unknown,” Talgam concluded.

A delightful message, a lot of fun and a great end to the day… 

The topic of education should be as important as money here at DLD Moscow, says Cindy Gallop. “All those who just left the room should have stayed.”

Gallop, in her black leather pants and skull-embroidered shirt, is in the best sense of the word, unconventional. As the CEO of “IfWeRanTheWorld.com” she makes us use our imagination.

“If I ran the world, I would … ” - and then you need to fill in the blanks on the website. An engaging way of tapping the single largest natural resource in the world: the pool of good intentions (human and business) that are never realized. ”You are the sum of your actions,” Gallop says. “Do good and make money simultaneously!”

An absolute power house, Gallop also intends to “socialize real world sex.” By that she means we should be “making love not porn.” With the Internet giving access to a world of pornography, she says we need to start talking about and promoting authentic sex. Her action platform for this project, “makelovenotporn.tv”, will be launched within the upcoming weeks, she announces on stage.

Actually, all panelists at DLD Moscow’s “Education For Tomorrow” session, intend to revolutionize the education system.

For instance, the co-founder of Bettermarks, Nikolas Deskovic, gives everyone the opportunity to learn math online. He says that in the US parents spend more than $100 billion in tutoring. This underlines a huge demand for being taught outside the traditional education system. Having started out in Germany, the project is about to spread around the whole world.

And then there is our close DLD friend Ellen Jorgensen, the co-founder and president of Genspace, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting citizen science and access to biotechnology. She invites everyone to just pass by the “Biosafety Level One” facility in Brooklyn, New York. There you can learn, for instance, how to do DNA fingerprinting techniques and much more cool science stuff you weren’t prepared for in school.

The hands-on biotechnology movement could spread because the facilities got a lot cheaper just within a decade, Jorgensen adds. The sequencing of the human genome 12 years ago cost 3 billion dollars. Now, the machines only cost about 1000 dollars.

In a bright future, there will be many Genspaces everywhere in the world.

“Out of complete dissatisfaction with education,” another disruptor, Menno van Dijk founded thnk.org, the Amsterdam School of Creative Leadership. Van Dijk says he has chosen to build up a system in which a truly global and diverse group - over 18-month, part-time, post-graduate - is growing into leaders with a potential significant societal impact far beyond Dutch borders.

“I seem to be the only one representing a traditional education system here on stage,” jokes Benjamin Soffer, manager at the Technion Research and Development Foundation in Israel. Cutting edge scientific and technological knowledge and capabilities is what the foundation claims to teach. He says, however, “universities have 1000-year-old education system. That needs to be changed.”

“Can you imagine ‘citizen educationalists’?” asks DLD’s own Steffi Czerny. “It’s already coming from the grassroots,” agrees Ellen Jorgensen.

Cindy Gallop adds: “if you change the mind-set of parents.”