Building the future we want - Note from Our Founder
Dr. Christina Dean | Founder and Board Chair, Redress
(Photog Credit: Joakim Blockstrom)
You’ve heard the famous movie line "If you build it, they will come". No doubt this concept — that if one puts in the time, effort, and love into making a dream a reality, then others will flock towards it — can be applied to many aspects of life.
It also applies to the Redress Design Award.
Who would have thought that in 2010, when Redress conceived our sustainable fashion design competition as a means of educating and exciting emerging fashion designers to transform fashion’s polluting ways, that we would have built the world’s largest sustainable fashion design competition from Redress’ home in the creative hub of Hong Kong.
All great building projects require great collaborators, and Redress certainly has those. It’s a huge honour to collaborate with some of the industry’s top leaders on the Redress Design Award, including this cycle with VF Foundation, VF Corporation, UPS, TAL Apparel, TENCEL™, and many more. And that Create Hong Kong is our ongoing lead sponsor since we put our first plan into action 12 years ago speaks to a shared vision to nurture creativity at home and connect with talents from abroad in the industry we love so much — fashion.
That said, it is ultimately our purpose that sets the Redress Design Award apart from being just any building project. As the world wakes up to the urgent need to clean up fashion’s act across the supply chain, the Redress Design Award’s purpose remains crystal clear: to educate emerging fashion professionals about sustainable and circular design, empowering them to tackle the industry’s sustainability issues from the root up. We are inspiring courageous designers who dare to dream of a better way of creation, bridging cultures and catalysing industry collaborations for designers and producers across the globe.
Building the Redress Design Award has certainly demanded time, effort, and love. This has come from the Redress team, a group of powerhouses bursting with intention and determination for change. Without Redress’ incredible team, we could only build a property — and not a home.
The work poured into the Redress Design Award has also come from our designer applicants as well as our communities and friends, who have flocked to support our mission, showing that realised dreams indeed rally support.
On behalf of Redress, we are truly grateful for your encouragement. That said, the real cheerleading must be reserved for our designers – those in the Grand Final and also the thousands who have walked with us over this cycle and the ones before – who are now themselves head-down creating new ‘buildings’ of their own in the huge fashion industry.
And to the designers of the future: if you build it — the people will come!
