Sustainable-fashion charity Redress has named designer Maddie Williams as the recipient of its The Redress Design Award 2019.

The award for the world’s largest sustainable fashion design competition includes the opportunity to create an upcycled retail collection for sustainable fashion brand Reverb, under the JNBY Group, one of Mainland China’s largest fashion houses.

Focusing on Redress’ mission to reduce waste in fashion, the high-profile event, attended by 1000 fashion VIPs and industry experts, served to spotlight the need to educate designers to address the global textile waste crisis. The winning designer applied upcycling and reconstruction techniques to reclaimed textiles, yarns and secondhand clothing, weaving them into zero-waste pieces that she constructed into her garments. 

“Taking my catwalk competition collection into a commercial upcycled collection will be a steep learning curve,” said Williams, “and I’ll be trying my best to keep sustainable, circular principles at the core of what I do. This is our time to tackle the environmental problems that we have inherited – we won’t get another chance.”

“Reverb is committed to making sustainable fashion go mainstream,” said international judge and creative director for Reverb Tillmann Lauterbach. “Working with Maddie, we want to give consumers more access to desirable sustainable fashion, particularly in Asia, where waste is a tremendous issue that needs to be addressed immediately.” 

Redress focuses on educating designers based on evidence that 80 per cent of a product’s environmental impact is laid down at the design stage.