'The EcoChic Design Award' opens for registrations

06 Jun '14

3 min read

Fashion NGO, Redress opens their fifth cycle of The EcoChic Design Award sustainable fashion design competition, challenging emerging designers in Asia and Europe to design a ‘Modern China Chic’ textile waste-reducing collection as they compete to win the main prize of designing an up-cycled capsule collection for China’s leading luxury brand, Shanghai Tang. The competition encourages designers to put sustainable fashion on China’s design, production and retail agenda, with its major sponsor being HKSAR’s Create Hong Kong.

Christina Dean, Founder and CEO of Redress said, ‘Textile waste continues to be an urgent environmental problem. China, as home to the world’s clothing and textile factories, is awash with textile waste and now she is taking note and turning waste into opportunity. We are witnessing a polluted China activate her creativity, stretch her supply chain and flex her fashion power as China’s fashion industry and consumers stylishly create clothes that are kinder on the environment. This unleashes a positive signal about China’s increasing sustainable fashion innovation.’

The competition’s focus on reducing textile waste responds to the vast amounts of environmentally-polluting textile waste produced and disposed of around the world. In China alone, approximately 20 million tonnes of textile waste is produced every year1. Designers are effective at reducing waste. It is estimated that the designer influences 80 to 90 percent of the environmental and economic costs of a product2. In response to this, the competition educates designers with the theory and techniques to enable them to create high-fashion designs using the minimal waste design techniques of zero-waste, up-cycling and reconstruction.

The EcoChic Design Award continuously expands its influence and footprint and is now accepting applicants from emerging fashion designers with less than three years’ experience living in Hong Kong, Mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, UK, France, Germany, Sweden and Denmark until the closing date on 15 August, 2014. Following the stringent judging process, ten finalists, one from each of the regions, will present their sustainable collections at Hong Kong Fashion Week in mid January 2015 to compete for career changing prizes.

China’s leading luxury brand, Shanghai Tang, is playing an influential role in the competition by opening their design doors for the first prize winner to design an up-cycled collection, made with the brand’s own surplus textiles, for retail in Shanghai Tang’s Asian and European markets. This step reflects a general global shift where brands are increasingly producing more sustainable clothing options for a growing environmentally conscious consumer market.