Looking to the Future
By Kay Liu, Circular Fashion Programme Director
The Redress Design Award has always been known for the impact of its runway shows. But behind the glamour, a fundamental pedagogical work for emerging fashion professionals takes place in Redress’ growing education team. This year, for example, Redress launched its Circular Fashion Design Pathway Course, a series of hard-hitting webinars created to help prospective entrants - designers and academics alike - deepen and enhance their knowledge of design for circularity. Over 10,000 people visit the Redress’ LEARN platform annually while its educational videos have had 95,000 views in total. The focus of all these resources is both on building skills and knowledge as well as long term behavioural change with the future leaders of the fashion industry.
It has never felt so urgent. In 2018, the Hong Kong Chapter of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN Hong Kong) conducted a city-wide survey of young people, aged 15 to 30, to gauge awareness about the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The findings spoke volumes: only 14.5% of respondents had heard of the SDGs. Of those who had, most prioritised aspects such as climate, land and oceans, as well as the factors that made life on the earth possible: clean water, clean energy, an end to poverty and hunger. The least important SDG was considered to be SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production. *
That finding goes some way to explaining why, despite nine in ten Gen Z consumers believing that companies have a responsibility to address environmental and social issues**, the world’s progress towards sustainable consumption and production patterns has been painfully slow. In the same year, the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that cutting emissions by about 45% by 2030 would give the planet a ‘reasonable chance’ of keeping global heating below 1.5C, the target agreed on in Paris in 2015. We are hopelessly off course. And, without addressing issues such as production, consumption and, of course, waste, we will never reach the reductions required.
I worked as Education Director under the Redress Design Award for nearly seven years. One of the things that I’ve loved the most has been seeing how much the competition inspires students and emerging designers to create positive change out of its legacy. Some alumni joined the competition when they were students and are now continuing their passion by working in sustainable design, some now even have young children of their own who they are passing on their values to! Every day, it becomes increasingly urgent that we must start educating global citizens about sustainability from a young age. Ultimately every individual has a responsibility and the ability to make a difference!
With this in mind, I’m very excited to now be a part of Redress' Circular Fashion team where we are developing educational resources for primary and secondary school children. Funded by the HKSAR Government’s Environment and Conservation Fund and the Environmental Campaign Committee, our newest project - the Circular Fashion Education Toolkit - will help teachers ignite much-needed conversations about these issues in the classroom. At the same time, students will be encouraged to think critically about the clothes they own, across the garments’ entire life cycles, from how we design and make them to how we use them - and what we do with them when we don’t want them anymore. The resources - designed to be applicable across a number of subject areas including geography, social sciences, maths and more - emphasise the broad reach of the industry into nearly every aspect of human life: from the natural world to garment workers, from culture and industry to economics. Lively videos, powerful statistics, key articles and even illustrated books curated by the team combine to create a rich virtual library of information that will give our children the tools they need to tackle the challenges to come. By empowering children of today to become the responsible consumers or even fashion professionals of tomorrow (with 1 in 6 around the world working in a fashion related role), this new resource supports and complements the sustainable fashion system that the Redress Design Award is facilitating which aligns with SDG12 - sustainable consumption and production.
Explore the new Circular Fashion Education Toolkit here.
* Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN Hong Kong) (2018), SDSN Hong Kong Commissions Youth Survey on SDGs
** "The state of fashion 2019 | McKinsey." 28 Nov. 2018, https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/the-state-of-fashion-2019-a-year-of-awakening. Accessed 7 Sep. 2020.