Fashion awards are typically established with the purpose of showcasing new styles to the world and celebrating designers with the most outstanding contributions to the industry during the year. The Redress Design Award takes it a step further by aiming to shine a spotlight on the importance and urgency of transitioning the industry towards a circular fashion system.
Redress is the world’s largest sustainable fashion design competition and is driven by the mission to educate emerging fashion designers about the industry’s waste crisis. By doing this, it aims to encourage the new generations of designers to adopt circularity within their fabrics, as well as raise awareness about the issue more broadly. Redress focuses on designs that are made for low waste and recyclability using low-impact processes and materials.
Redress founder Christina Dean says that the crisis “can’t be swept under the carpet any longer.” This year’s edition saw COVID-19 as an opportunity to shine a light on the concept of the circular economy within the fashion industry. With so many supply chain and manufacturing disruptions during the pandemic, Redress took the chance to stress the importance of reducing and repurposing materials as much as possible, to prevent waste.
The 2020 Redress Design Award announced two winners, including menswear designer Le Ngoc Ha Thu from Vietnam, whose line of clothing stood out among hundreds of entries from 48 countries. As part of the winning prize, Thu will collaborate with Timberland to learn more about creating sustainable fashion.
Argentinian designer Juliana Garcia Bello won the womenswear design award. “I have learned so much during my participation in the Redress Design Award and have definitely come out of this with a reinforced feeling that collaboration is the key,” Bello said. “We designers need to share our strengths and be inspired by each other.” Bello will work alongside The R Collective, an award-winning brand focused on upcycling.
Hopefully, the fashion industry will see more eco-conscious fashion awards like these pop up in the near future, catalyzing the industry’s transition towards circularity.
