As a judge for this year’s Mindful Fashion Circular Design Awards, the sustainability editor and author of Sundressed offers her perspective on the state of fashion now.
Returning for its second year, the annual Mindful Fashion New Zealand Circular Design Awards has attracted a range of entries with finalists
“Around the world, millions of tonnes of clothes are produced, worn, and thrown away each year, with more than 85% ending up in landfills,” explains Jacinta Fitzgerald, Mindful Fashion’s chief executive.
“In Aotearoa New Zealand, approximately 74,000 tonnes of clothing are consumed each year. Auckland’s Redvale landfill alone receives 70 trucks of clothing waste each week. We need to focus on collective solutions to do better.”
To help whittle down this year’s finalists, Jacinta enlisted the help of industry professionals, including three who were charged with selecting their finalists for a newly introduced award: The Circular Business Innovation Award.
This award was judged separately by author of Sundressed and journalist for Elle Australia and The Guardian Lucianne Tonti, circular economy specialist at Sustainable Business Network James Griffin, and head of product at Trade Me Sue Anderson.
For Lucianne, being involved with this year’s awards was a chance to get behind the awards and its commitment not only to creative innovation but business innovation too.
“It’s so important that the market meets this moment in the climate crisis,” she says speaking from her base in Melbourne. “Innovations to reuse, reduce, repair and recycle can be the cornerstone of wonderful commercially successful businesses. I love to see new and creative models that prove a successful business can also be successful for the environment.”
As the fashion editor of The Saturday Paper, the sustainability editor at large for Elle Australia and a regular contributor to the Guardian, where she writes the weekly column Closet Clinic, Luicanne is a leading voice in championing a transparent and circular fashion industry on a global scale.
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Advertise with NZME.Her award-winning book Sundressed: Natural Fibres and the Future of Fashion was published in 2022 and has cemented her position as a key voice in providing nature-based solutions to complex problems within the fashion and luxury sector.
“You grow some of the most sustainable wool in the world in New Zealand. Wool is one of the most valuable fibres in a circular economy,” she says.
“We know people keep wool garments for longer and are more likely to pass them on to family and friends. Wool is durable, warm, resistant to stains and odours and extremely versatile. It’s also easily repaired and one of the most recycled materials and it can return to the earth. Plus when it’s grown regeneratively it can restore biodiversity and ecosystem functionality to landscapes while improving soil health and sequestering carbon.
“Textile waste starts at the design process. We have to create high-value products that people keep for a long time, wear, repair, cherish and pass on that have many pathways at end of life. When you choose a material like ZQRX wool you are setting yourself up for success.”
For this year’s Mindful Fashion Awards, three finalists were selected as part of the Circular Business Innovation Award, created to recognise the role of business in transforming our economy to a low-carbon and circular system.
The finalists are Offcut Caps, an upcycling business from Christchurch that transforms all kinds of industry waste into marketable, useful products; Untouched World’s “Rubbish Socks” initiative, the beloved local label’s focus on producing a new material and desirable product that celebrates the unique beauty of recycled yarn; and another local stalwart, Standard Issue, with its “Care for Life” initiative, encouraging its customers to buy once, buy well and offering repair services to redistribution and end-of-life recycling.
“It was such a great experience to see what each judge valued and took away from the entries. The standard was very high and the experience has left me feeling hopeful, which doesn’t happen very often,” says Lucianne.
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Advertise with NZME.“Rubbish socks stood out because they had such a thorough, thoughtful approach to circularity starting from their commitment to zero waste design and then to using remnant material, to create yarn, to make socks. It’s a great example of how deeply fashion businesses need to think about their environmental impacts.”
“Offcut Caps had a great story – taking waste from places that might otherwise be forgotten and turning them into desirable products. It’s this kind of out-of-the-box thinking that we need more of; while Care for Life is a great example of a brand taking responsibility for its products throughout its life cycle, which is so key to changing the way people think about their clothes.”
Lucianne’s connection to the awards and our local fashion industry also includes collaborating with one of our own sustainable fashion leaders, Wellington-based Kowtow, celebrating the brand’s Melbourne store and move to plastic-free in May.
“Kowtow is a rare example of a deeply thoughtful brand that has embedded their values into the core of the product,” she says.
“I think this can-do attitude, the pursuit of excellence and desire to truly treat the earth like something to respect and revere runs through much of the New Zealand fashion industry. It’s a very special energy that I hope the rest of the world can learn from. There’s a thoroughness to the approach that’s so refreshing.”
Lucianne’s own experience of living in Paris and London, where she worked with some of the most talented creative directors in the world, led her to establish a sustainable fashion agency in Paris in 2019. During the pandemic this transformed into Prelude, an online store that was described by American Vogue as “paving the way for a slower, gentler fashion industry”. Today, she’s put that global experience to good use as an advocate for local solutions that can have a big impact.
“In a lot of ways, we are all experiencing similar challenges in circularity from a lack of local manufacturing capacity for raw materials to the infrastructure to collect and sort waste,” says Lucianne.
“The strongest circular solutions are always ones that identify an issue in their community, engage with their peers and endeavour to solve problems on-shore. This often requires more investment in training and infrastructure so it requires a longer view and some patience but once the skills and systems are in place everyone can benefit from them.
“Since post-consumer textile to textile recycling is proving so challenging we are seeing three big themes emerge in the global conversation. The first is the Or Foundation’s Speak Volumes campaign which demands brands disclose their production volumes in an effort to reduce overproduction.
“The second is a focus on rental, resale and repair like the Ellen MacArthur foundation’s new programme. Finally, leading researchers are turning their focus to transforming textile waste into other products – what we used to think of as downcycling – but actually is more like biomimicry and looking to nature for ways to deal with waste.”
As for an indigenous approach to how cultural values can help shape the framework of a true circular fashion eco-system, Lucianne says without cultural values, we can’t have circularity.
“Unfortunately, the prevailing global culture for the last 40 or so years has been to make as much money as possible regardless of the consequences for people and planet. Hopefully, this period of cultural and intellectual poverty is coming to an end and we’re at the beginning of a global shift back towards value systems that honour the earth, kindness, respect, wonder, generosity, community, quality and longevity.”
With all this in mind, is there hope for a sustainable future in fashion?
“The global fashion industry definitely has pockets of hope, ingenuity and beauty. I always feel energised and excited when I leave a conference with very smart people who are tackling these problems head-on. But overwhelmingly I am very disaffected by the big players plowing ahead with business as usual – the rise of Shein and Temu is heartbreaking.
“We cannot keep producing enormous volumes of clothes with an ever-increasing reliance on fossil fuel-based fabrics and manufacturing. Let’s be very clear: without polyester, there would be no fast fashion. Until the industry is willing to face this and adapt their business model (which has not changed in 100 years making it archaic) we will not reduce emissions in line with a 1.5-degree emissions target.”
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