As young designers increasingly influence the shape of fashion - upcycling surplus stock or made garments, using tighter patterns, remnants and sustainable fabrics, they are giving fashion a voice for the planet that the industry could never even have dreamed of before. (And for which it had no rights to a voice anyway.) Young designers, with the support of NFPs like Hong Kong's Redress are bringing a very different view of responsibility to an industry that for too long has taken design at any cost for granted. Emerging designers are turning out high end fashion that redefines the tenements of design itself, by considering garments holistically. Redress Design Awards educate emerging fashion designers around the world in the core circular design principals of zero-waste, up-cycling and reconstruction. When Circular design becomes a precondition for competitions like this, it puts the sustainable design talent in the global spotlight and you can see from the fashion in this year's awards that the standards are very very high.
Circular fashion, by definition, especially when using existing pieces could still be defined by bargains you can find at the Op Shop, but as fashion leadership is increasingly dis-aggregated, circular fashion is as much a leader in the way we think about what's good to wear as any issue of Elle or Harper's Bazaar (who regularly feature circular designers anyway.) Redress (previously called the EcoChic) is a Hong Kong based circular fashion NFP partly sponsored by Create Hong Kong. The Redress Design Awards include the USA along with Europe and all of Asia and the 2019 winner was a Brit called Maddie Williams, whose design techniques include upcycling, zero waste and reconstruction.