Celebrating the comeback of Awards Season in Aotearoa
Back in June, we celebrated the announcement that New Zealand’s longest-running fashion glossy, Fashion Quarterly, would be launching its annual fashion awards, sponsored by Shark Beauty. The inaugural awards night, held in August, did what they said they would by wrapping their arms around a long list of local creators and brands who have excelled in their field over the past year. It was a welcome sight to see the return of some sort of award that recognised our fashion and beauty industry after some tough times.
Recently, another formidable fashion and lifestyle title, Viva, also announced their own Beauty Awards, sponsored by Glow Lab. The exhaustive list of categories aims to celebrate brands both local and global, as well as shining a light on local business entrepreneurs who have excelled in beauty this year.
Add to this the annual Denizen Everyday Heroes awards (an annual online fixture that goes far beyond local fashion and beauty) and you’d be forgiven for thinking all we do down here in Aotearoa is dish out gongs.
Speaking of gongs, the country’s most earnest fashion entity, Mindful Fashion, has announced the winners of the 2024 Circular Design Awards, adding four trophies and a shared prize pool of cash (NZD$50,000.00) to the lives of four local designers and brands.
What Is Mindful Fashion?
Started in 2019 by fashion designer Kate Sylvester and Ruby’s General Manager Emily Miller-Sharma, Mindful Fashion was formed in response to the perceived injustices of fashion’s self-appointed ethics judge and jury, the Tearfund Report, handing out some less-then-desirable grades to Kate and Ruby. This forced both brands to reconsider if the Tearfund system was, in fact, a fair and just way to assess to ethics of New Zealand clothing designers and their manufacturers (wherever they were located around the globe). Soon after Mindful Fashion was established, a slew of designers joined the program with the aim of engaging a ‘strength in numbers’ approach to make auditing local manufacturing a cheaper and easier process, and also to see if there were ways of future-proofing the local fashion economy. The benefits of the exercise have been robust, culminating in the publication of the 2024 Threads of Tomorrow report, compiled by Ernst & Young, which analysed where the industry is at, and offered some pathways forward to ensure its survival and, hopefully, its growth.
What Are The Mindful Fashion Circular Design Awards?
Mindful Fashion’s Circular Design Awards program was set up to challenge designers and businesses from around the country to showcase innovative ways to keep materials in use, using both Aotearoa’s unique place in the world and circular economy principles to guide their work. In 2024, four outstanding creations have taken out top honours with the Supreme Award winners sharing in a NZD$50k prize pool.
The 2024 winners are as follows:
The Award for Creative Excellence in Circular Design – Jacqueline Tsang (above). 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.
Award for Material Innovation – Sue Prescott for her entry titled ‘Southerly Change’ (above). 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.
Award for Excellence from a Rising Talent in Circular Design – Ella Fidler (above). 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.
Circular Business Innovation Award (new in 2024) – Untouched World (above), 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.
The finalist photoshoot was styled by Dan Ahwa and photographed by Apela Bell.
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.”