Environmental NGO Redress presents a preview of 11 collections to be shown at the Grand Final of the world’s largest sustainable fashion design competition – the Redress Design Award – this 6 September. ‘In Between’ is a striking photoshoot featuring the work of exceptional emerging sustainable design talent, shortlisted from applications hailing from a record 55 countries earlier this year.
This month hundreds of Hong Kongers visited our latest Pop-up shop eager to get their hands on quality secondhand clothes and accessories from the Redress closet. Our pop-up generated valuable funding for Redress and our work to cut waste out of fashion whilst promoting the local circular economy, as shoppers revealed in the treasures that we freed from hibernation in Hong Kong’s wardrobes and put back into use in one of our largest clothing drives to date!
It’s back... Fashion Revolution’s free online course (which launched last year), is running again on Future Learn. With just 4 hours a week for 3 weeks, discover who made your clothes, share their stories and influence global change with this course created in partnership with the University of Exeter.
The course is aimed at anyone with an interest in fashion, trade, ethics and activism, including those involved in the Fashion Revolution movement. It is also suitable for teachers who want to enrich their school, further education and higher education curricula.
Quick – the course started on 25 June, but you are not too late to catch up.
Get ready for the summer season and find yourself a bargain at our second-hand pop-up shop in Central at the OnTheList showroom!
Our pre-loved clothing collection has every fashion style covered - from A(rmani) to Z(ara) and everything in between. Stop by and find suitable gifts for the kids, your partner, friends and of course, yourself!
Choosing to shop secondhand over new minimises the environmental impacts of your wardrobe. Redress has pre-selected top quality pre-loved (and some never worn) women's, men's and children's clothes and accessories. Our new book Dress [with] Sense will also be on sale!
We are partnering up again with OnTheList, who share our vision to minimise the negative impacts of fashion. Each year, an inestimable amount of clothing is destroyed by brands as they are no longer of any value. OnTheList helps brands make space in their warehouses sustainably, by organising weekly flash sales, members can enjoy the best deal in town and brands can turn their old inventory into an opportunity.
Spend over $500 and get entered in a draw to win John Masters Organics skincare goodies worth $1,100!
Visit John Masters Organics Hong Kong & Macau's Online Flash Sale at OnTheList here from 3-8 July! Up to 40% off all available haircare products.
All profits from our pop-up will go to supporting the work of Redress. Cash and credit cards accepted - don't forget to bring your own bag!
Coinciding with the recent Copenhagen Fashion Summit, the Global Fashion Agenda released their second edition of the 'Pulse of the Fashion Industry' report, which provides an in-depth assessment of the fashion industry’s environmental and social performance. According to the 124-page assessment, 75% of fashion companies have improved their environmental and social performance over the last year with their pulse ‘score’ rising from 32 to 38 (out of 100), confirming that sustainability is rising on the corporate agenda. Instead of measuring financial consequences, this edition of the report places a positive spin on the numbers and focuses on the potential financial gains that result from taking action. With clear benefits to the bottom line, this should be music to shareholders ears and provide additional traction to move the industry forward.
Following a worldwide search for sustainable fashion design talent, 11 finalists have been announced for the Redress Design Award 2018. Each representing their respective regions, the designers embody a growing movement to bring textile waste back into fashion and take the circular economy mainstream.
After seeing thousands of global votes cast over four-week period, we are pleased to announce that the public have spoken. New-York based Korean designer, Mimi Jeong, has been selected as favourite designer for her outstanding Redress Design Award 2018 submission and takes home the title of Redress Design Award 2018 ‘People’s Choice’ winner. Mimi made a lasting impression with her collection that up-cycles a variety of textiles including swatches and cut-and-sew waste, and was inspired by the works of Catalan architect, Antoni Gaudi. Using vibrant colour and the artist’s signature mosaic designs she creates a collection full of sculptural form.
We’re thrilled to unveil the 30 Redress Design Award 2018 semi-finalists who will be going through to the next round of the competition! This year’s competition has been the toughest cycle yet since the launch of the world’s largest sustainable fashion design competition in 2011. Reviewing a record number of applications from 56 regions, the expert judging panels from around the globe scored the applicants based on creativity, originality, sustainability and market viability in order to cut hundreds of ambitious young sustainable designers down to just 30.
Click here to meet the 30 semi-finalists!
In 2005, Dame Ellen McArthur became the fastest solo sailor to circumnavigate the globe. During her journey, she realised just how important her resources were to survival: “Suddenly I realised our global economy is no different,” she told sustainable consultants McKinsey.
Today, Dame Ellen is one of the world’s most high profile proponents of a circular economy, in which waste is no longer discarded but becomes, instead, another precious resource.
The original documentary Frontline Fashion was seen by millions but this year’s TV special edition is set to broadcast the competition and its aims even further afield. Bel Jacobs reports.
My mother always told me “What goes around comes around”. I’ve carried this philosophy through life; even into how I think about how we make and dispose of clothes and how I imagine the circular economy.
The circular economy can sometimes seem confusing. But it’s simple. Think of how Mother Nature does it, she’s the circular economy master. When a tree falls over and decomposes, every part of that tree is put to good use feeding the forest floor and enriching all biodiversity, soil, slugs, fungi and fauna included.
“Confidence is so important. It’s so vital to be confident in your work and speak with authority. Giving yourself time to learn your medium from A-Z will definitely help with that. Because at the end of the day, you are your business.”
Entering the EcoChic Design Award 2014/15 was finalist Catherine Hudson’s first step into sustainable fashion: “I was shown the effects of throwaway fashion and how damaging it was to the environment,” she recalls. “And I wanted to be part of the solution - to be fashion forward in my work ethic as well as in my design execution.”
Can rethinking energy, disruptive reduction and design for the future provide the necessary levers for change? Redress believes so, and so do the US NGO ClimateWorks Foundation and environmental sustainability experts Quantis, who have recently released the Measuring Fashion 2018 report, which provides a holistic assessment of the environmental impacts of the global apparel and footwear industries. The report considered the industries’ value chains across seven stages – from fibre production and material extraction to end-of-life – and looked at different environmental indicators including climate change, resources, freshwater withdrawal, ecosystem quality and human health. The research reveals that the apparel industry alone accounts for a shocking 6.7% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Catch the broadcast debut of Frontline Fashion 2 on Lifetime Asia at 8pm (Singapore time), 23 March 2018.
Frontline Fashion 2 follows 10 emerging designers from across the globe who are determined to change the future of fashion – one of the most polluting industries imaginable. Battling to win the Redress Design Award, the world's largest sustainable design competition, the 10 finalists descend into Hong Kong - the epicentre of Asia's fashion scene - to showcase their collections, together with their hopes and dreams in a live Grand Final.
The applications are in!
The first truly global cycle of the Redress Design Award has been an overwhelming success. Expanding beyond Asia, Europe and the USA for the first time, our sustainable fashion design competition has attracted a record number of applications from designers living in more than 50 countries around the globe, including first time applications from countries such as Bolivia, Estonia, Australia and Kenya.
First prizewinner of the Redress Design Award 2017 (formerly the EcoChic Design Award), Kate Morris’ sustainable knitwear Pop Collection launches with The R Collective, the pioneering up-cycled fashion brand and social impact business. Born from NGO Redress, The R Collective is determined to change wasteful practices in the fashion industry. Kate’s playful, pop-art inspired limited collection consists of 8 knitwear styles, including reversible coatigans, sweaters and turtle necks, all of which were created by up-cycling luxury yarn waste in a design collaboration with knitwear brand, 22 Factor.
We all know someone like my friend Grace. She’s fair and focused and her actions are laden with her genuine personal values in which honesty, kindness and generally ‘doing the right thing’ rule supreme, even after a slog of a week, bad PMT or if her boss or boyfriend (or both) are getting her down. She’s insightful about most things - from the healthiest food, fashion to fitness and she’s always got something to say about feminism - and this all makes her so damned attractive (on the inside and outside) that people can’t help but be drawn to her - perhaps hoping that her original and authentic personality is contagious and that some of it will rub off on us. Quite honestly, we’d all like to be more like Grace.
We celebrated the launch of the eighth cycle of our flagship programme, the Redress Design Award (formerly the EcoChic Design Award) – the world’s largest sustainable fashion design competition - with an event underpinning our mission at Eaton House in Hong Kong on January 19th. A panel of industry experts reflected on the current state of sustainable fashion and why 2018 represents a critical tipping point for consumers, designers and brands to incorporate sustainability across the supply chain. We also heard from Redress Design Award Alumni designer Victor Chu on his experiences participating in the competition and his latest design collaboration with new up-cycling brand, The R Collective, which was on display.
It’s not everyday that you have an ethical fashion and style epiphany whilst standing on top of a filthy Hong Kong landfill watching a queue of rubbish trucks dump their trash out. But this happened to me. This unlikely, and somewhat smelly, moment gave me such a seismic wake up call about my relationship with my clothes and how much rubbish I created that my entire appreciation of fashion was whiplashed into radical change. In that moment, with countless birds flying afoot and swooping down to eat scraps, I became an ethical fashion consumer and I committed to only wearing secondhand, vintage, upcycled or recycled clothes for the rest of my days. I have never looked back, or looked or felt better, since.
