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Dream for Change 2025 finalists at the Women At Dior and UNESCO partnership event in Paris
Eric Mercier
On the occasion of the fifth Women At Dior and UNESCO Global Conference in Paris, falling just a week after Jonathan Anderson’s Dior Menswear debut, the LVMH maison announced the winners of its 2025 Dream For Change project.
The initiative spearheaded by Vice President Corporate Social Responsibility at Christian Dior Couture, Isabelle Faggianelli focuses on mentoring, education and incubation. Over the course of the year, 1500 Dior employees mentored 2500 young female talents from 90 countries and supported them in the pursuit of respective impact driven global projects empowering women to fulfill their potential.
During the Women At Dior conference, five finalists pitched their projects. For the first time, this took an interactive format with the two winners chosen by public jury made up of the conference’s delegates with live voting via QR code.
Winning projects were Mama Maisha and Femini Lab, both of which combine human endeavor with artificial intelligence.
Women At Dior Dream For Change winners
Kenya based Mama Maisha educates the country’s informal female product vendors in financial literacy, helping them to manage their budgets and save for their old age via both physical planners and an AI chatbot currently under development. They are also working with enterprise partners to match savings amassed by the vendors
Femini Lab is a French initiative that combines physical intervention in schools with an AI engineered digital platform offering personalized guidance. Goal is to give young women the skills to start their own businesses.
Women At Dior Dream For Change finalists
The other three finalists were Her Cycle, The Embossers and P.E.T.A.L.S.
Her Cycle works with girls in the United States, educating them on menstrual health and available resources, combining a digital platform with physical outreach while Korea based The Embossers has created a digital gender equality dictionary offering alternative terms for sexist ones ingrained in the Korean lexicon. Also featuring elements of gamification, it harnesses the power language to empower a positive mindset.
P.E.T.A.L.S is reviving the ancient Nepalese craft of incense making by recycling devotional flowers discarded in temples while giving independence and employment to visually impaired women. With a focus on transmission, the latter are given the tools to upskill a new generation.
Women At Dior voices for change
The Women At Dior and UNESCO conference also harnessed the voices of prominent figures campaigning for the empowerment of women in the worlds of business, sport and the arts.
Zahia Ziouani, Musical and Artistic Director of the symphony orchestra Divertimento who led the closing ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games shared how her orchestra is making the oft male dominated and elitist world of classical music accessible to all while world skydiving champion and co-founder of zerOGravity, Domitille Kiger, described the impact of of mentorship on her team’s record-breaking jumps.
Filmmaker and advocate Zuriel Oduwole, the youngest nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, shared how she’d been instrumental in ending child marriage in Mozambique when she was 15.
Elsewhere Dior’s Director of Human Resources Maud Alvarez-Pereyre and UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Education Stefania Giannini emphasized the importance of education as a lever for women’s empowerment and the responsibility of institutions and companies to build a more equitable and sustainable future by upskilling teams in AI, the next wave of digital transformation, while retaining the critical thinking that separates humans from machines.
Alongside initiatives from other leading French Groups such as L’Oréal’s YSL Beauty, Dior’s Women At Dior project, demonstrates the power of the luxury industry as a force for change and women’s empowerment.
