Supreme Winners Announced At Mindful Fashion Circular Design Awards 2024

WEDNESDAY 25 SEPTEMBER 2024

The winners of the Mindful Fashion Circular Design Awards have been announced at a Gala event this evening, showcasing Aotearoa New Zealand’s finest fashion innovations made from reimagined waste materials.

Designers and businesses from around the country were challenged to showcase innovative ways to keep materials in use, while using a dual lens of our unique place in the world and circular economy principles to guide their work. Four outstanding creations have taken out top honours with the Supreme Award winners sharing in a $50k prize pool.

The Award for Creative Excellence in Circular Design was awarded to Jacqueline Tsang. Her look, titled ‘Fabric has Memory’ redesigns obsolete coffee sacks sourced from local cafes, damaged kimonos and vintage tapestries, to create a high fashion luxury outfit.

Sue Prescott won the Award for Material Innovation for her entry titled ‘Southerly Change’. Prescott’s design incorporated 95% sail-cloth waste, locally sourced from Wellington. The final look offers both protection and joy through use of colour and silhouette and shows that once a fabric reaches the end of its intended first life, it still has life to live.

Ella Fidler’s design titled ‘Scrap Yarn’ won the Award for Excellence from a Rising Talent in Circular Design. Fidler assessed the full life cycle of her fabric and chose waste from the production process that would be recyclable at the end of its new life.

The winner of the Circular Business Innovation Award (new in 2024) was Untouched World, for its Rubbish Socks initiative which stood out to judges for fully embodying the pillars of circularity. Data provided in the entry shows an outstanding 99% textile waste recycling rate. In the last year Untouched World has diverted over 1 tonne of textile waste, recycled through various streams, including Rubbish Socks.

Jacinta FitzGerald, Mindful Fashion Chief Executive acknowledges the outstanding creativity and calibre of the finalists this year from design concepts through to craftsmanship.

“This year the judging panel was extremely impressed by the overall high quality of work from entrants. Our Supreme winners treated their chosen textiles as precious resources and used them to produce an outcome of greater value, treating them not as a limitation but as a starting point for innovation.”

“Encouragingly, we noticed an increased focus on tackling industry and business waste streams and thoroughly enjoyed understanding how each designer had chosen to take on the challenge.”

“One of our intentions of these awards is educate consumers and businesses on the importance of moving towards circular systems, which has the potential to reduce emissions by one-third. Textile waste starts at the design stage, so Mindful Fashion NZ has devised the Circular Design Awards to inspire and educate the next generation of designers in Aotearoa to rethink their foundational practices and design towards a circular future. If the Supreme winners’ creations are anything to go by, there’s a positive future ahead,” says FitzGerald.

Delivered in partnership with the Gattung Foundation, the Awards celebrate the best innovation in sustainable design and sustainable business. The Awards educates the next generation of designers to design for circularity from the beginning, and reimagine fashion as waste-free. It showcases the best-practice initiatives from New Zealand businesses who are leading the charge.

Earlier this year, Mindful Fashion released the hard-hitting ‘Threads of Tomorrow’ – Crafting the Future of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Fashion, Clothing and Textiles Landscape. The report identified that 52,000 tonnes of clothing waste goes to landfill every year. Shockingly that’s 143 tonnes to landfill daily in Aotearoa.

Mindful Fashion is using initiatives like the Circular Design Awards to champion the local industry towards a circular future, by following the four action areas and fifteen corresponding recommendations identified in the Threads of Tomorrow report that provide a clear roadmap for the industry.

Please see the full list of 2024 winners here:

Award for Creative Excellence in Circular Design:

WINNER: Jacqueline Tsang: Fabric has Memory. This entry honours the designers’ ancestors and draws inspiration from the nostalgia of places, customs and memories of her past. Utilising obsolete coffee sacks sourced from local cafes, damaged kimonos and vintage tapestries, the design elevates the materials through use of craft techniques and creative design elements and weaves them together with the designer’s story of connection to place, resulting in a high fashion luxury outfit showing a high level of attention to detail and construction.

Category finalists:

• Grant Davy: Modernising Tradition.
• Natalia Bertolo: Twist, Tuck and Roll.

Award for Material Innovation:

WINNER: Sue Prescott: Southerly Change. Presents a contemporary raincoat crafted from 95% locally sourced sail-cloth waste, designed to offer protection from Wellington's famously unpredictable weather. Infused with tales of maritime adventures, this garment ages gracefully as its fabric transitions to a kinder, land-based life. Making use of two old racing spinnakers that had reached the end of their viable life as sails, the design confronts the ubiquitous nature of the raincoat and creates a protective garment that speaks to the materials original life while offering protection and joy through use of colour and silhouette.

Category finalists:

• Stefanie Borkowski: Port in a Storm.
• Zheyi Ruan: Textural Study.

Award for Excellence from a Rising Talent in Circular Design:

WINNER: Ella Fidler: Scrap Yarn. Careful consideration was given to the choice of waste material used in this outfit, to ensure that it was also recyclable at the end of its new life. The feature item is a vest made from pre-production fabric waste, where a new yarn has been created from scraps from the garment cutting process and constructed into a tailored vest, leaving raw edges that illustrate the origins of the material while elevating the design through choice of design elements to create a high fashion garment.

Category finalists:

• Nethasha Abeysinghe: Visualise This.
• Salma Ibrahim-Jerrywo: Made to Last.

Circular Business Innovation Award sponsored by Trade Me (new category in 2024):

Recognising the pivotal role of business in transforming our economy to a low carbon and circular ecosystem, the Circular Business Innovation Award is a new category which celebrates businesses that are working to embed circular systems and principles into their business operations and value propositions.

MFNZ challenged businesses to demonstrate how they had redesigned a product, service, or process, or designed out a waste stream, and worked to ensure the materials and resources are kept in circulation.

WINNER: Untouched World: Rubbish Socks. This initiative stood out to judges as truly embodying the pillars of circularity: working with renewable fibres, minimising waste, keeping materials in circulation at high value through recycling to produce a new material and desirable product that truly celebrates the unique beauty of recycled yarn. Data provided shows a 99% textile waste recycling rate.

Category finalists:

• Offcut: Offcut Caps.
• Standard Issue: Care for Life.

The Circular Design Award 2024 judging panel includes:

• Dame Theresa Gattung – Businesswoman and Entrepreneur
• Marilou Dadat – Creative Director, Kowtow Clothing
• Lucianne Tonti – International Journalist and author
• Dan Ahwa – Creative Director, NZ Herald Viva
• Sandra Tupu – Founder, Flying Fox Clothing
• Dylan Mulder – Designer, Mulder
• Deanna Didovich – Creative Director, Ruby
• Natasha Ovely – Founder and Designer, Starving Artist Fund
• Sue Anderson – Head of Product, Trade Me
• James Griffin – Circular Economy lead, Sustainable Business Network

The Threads of Tomorrow report can be viewed at www.mindfulfashion.co.nz

The four actions areas and 15 corresponding recommendations outlined in Threads of Tomorrow, all of which have identified stakeholders responsible for driving them forward, are:

1. Growing a skilled workforce

Develop a skilled workforce to support a thriving NZFCTI and cultivate new talent to fill existing and future gaps.

1. Advancing local materials and manufacturing

Enhance local manufacturing capability to boost GDP, and show leadership in development and use of low-impact materials.

1. Enabling a circular economy

Increase the use of clothing and create value through circular and recycling systems, resulting in minimal textile waste.

1. Promoting New Zealand fashion, clothing and textiles

Engage with consumers to promote the benefits of local business and sustainability and embed circular and responsible practices into business models to stimulate economic activity.

About Mindful Fashion NZ:

Mindful Fashion New Zealand unites the fashion and textile industry through its mission to create an innovative, full-circle and thriving future for fashion and textiles in Aotearoa. As the only industry body for this sector in New Zealand it is uniquely positioned to drive the collaboration required to build a sustainable and thriving future for the industry that creates positive benefits for people and the environment.

© Scoop Media