IMPROBABLE fASHION

June 4-5, 2026

You know Design Thinking.

Now meet its more rebellious, Parisian cousin:

Art Thinking, where fashion, art, and the improbable collide.

Artworks by Nicolas Guiraud

Fashion is the most immediate expression of the zeitgeist—the cultural mood of our time. Today, it stands at the center of accelerating uncertainty.

From pandemic dressing to TikTok aesthetics, from heritage luxury to ultra-fast fashion, the industry is transforming at unprecedented speed. Algorithmic visibility, digital communities, social media, and artificial intelligence are reshaping not only markets but identity, desire, aesthetics, and time itself.

In this environment, leaders must rethink business models, creative processes, organizational structures, and systemic impact. Traditional paradigms are no longer sufficient. The future demands new forms of value creation that integrate sustainability, digital acceleration, and cultural relevance.

Improbable Fashion is a two-day executive seminar designed by ESCP Business School’s Improbable Chair by Galeries Lafayette to meet this challenge. Using Art Thinking, an evidence-based methodology developed by Professor Sylvain Bureau, participants learn to navigate uncertainty, unlock strategic imagination, and generate bold, cross-disciplinary solutions.

Rooted in fashion’s history of radical artistic disruption—from Schiaparelli’s Surrealism to Margiela’s conceptual subversion—the program equips participants not only to anticipate change, but to shape it.

Bringing together industry leaders and selected students from ENSAD, Mines, Dauphine (PSL), Stanford University, and ESCP Business School, Improbable Fashion creates a rare, intergenerational and interdisciplinary space to prototype the future of fashion.

I believe in blurring the lines between art and fashion.

M. Margiela

Strategic Angles

  • Understand how artificial intelligence and human creativity co-evolve. Move from automation to augmentation, redefining authorship, design processes, and creative leadership in fashion.

  • Go beyond campaigns. Design meaningful, long-term brand narratives that build emotional connection, cultural relevance, and community.

  • Reinvent retail as an immersive ecosystem—blending digital and physical spaces into seamless, memorable brand experiences.

  • Shift from linear production to circular and regenerative strategies. Rethink value creation across sourcing, production, and consumption.

  • Redefine fashion’s role in a world shaped by planetary limits, ethical urgency, and shifting societal values. Learn to innovate within constraint.

  • Develop the capacity to lead through ambiguity, acceleration, and paradox. Cultivate strategic imagination and talents in a rapidly transforming industry.

Learning Experience

Designed by Professor Sylvain Bureau and artist Pierre Tectin at ESCP, Improbable has been listed as Highly Commended by the Financial Times and is taught internationally—from Stanford University to the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT).

Improbable Fashion is an immersive, high-intensity experience that transforms skills, mindsets, projects, and networks. It is not traditional training, but a lasting learning journey.

Through masterclasses, intense workshops, and curated creative tension, participants challenge conventional business thinking and unlock new strategic perspectives. Using disruptive practices—deviation, conceptual experimentation, material and narrative subversion—they create a bold, improbable art piece unveiled during a memorable vernissage.

Key Outcomes

  • Use Art Thinking as a concrete transformation tool for business and creativity

  • Strengthen creative leadership in times of uncertainty

  • Master AI × Artistic Intelligence as strategic drivers of innovation

  • Rethink fashion models in the age of the Anthropocene

  • Expand your ecosystem through rare intergenerational and cross-disciplinary collaboration

  • Prototype bold, improbable perspectives ready to challenge dominant industry logics

Earn the Art Thinking Certificate from ESCP Business School

Who Will You Learn With?

Participants :

  • Executives and leaders from the fashion and creative industries

  • Selected students from ENAMOMA (Ensad / Mines / Dauphine / PSL), Stanford University, and ESCP Business School

Speakers and mentors  :

  • Pr. Sylvain Bureau - Founder of the art thinking method

  • Emilie Kirsch - Resident artist for Petit H, Hermès

  • Nicolas Guiraud - Photographer and artists / founder and creative Director of Fashion Magazine

  • Seamus Yu Harte - Head of Learning Experience, d.school, Stanford University

Format & Location

Duration: 2 days
Language: English
Location: Paris

An Improbable Executive Education experience by ESCP Business School to shape the future of fashion.