The winners of the Mindful Fashion Circular Design Awards have been announced at a Gala event this evening, showcasing Aotearoa New Zealand’s finest fashion innovations made from reimagined waste materials.

Designers and businesses from around the country were challenged to showcase innovative ways to keep materials in use, while using a dual lens of our unique place in the world and circular economy principles to guide their work. Four outstanding creations have taken out top honours with the Supreme Award winners sharing in a $50k prize pool.

Circular Business Innovation Award (new in 2024)

Untouched World, for their Rubbish Socks initiative. This 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 and recycled through various streams, including Rubbish Socks.

Award for Creative Excellence in Circular Design

Awarded to Jacqueline Tsang. 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

Awarded to Sue Prescott for her entry titled ‘Southerly Change’. 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

Awarded to Ella Fidler for her entry 'Scrap Yarn'. 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.

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.”

“Encouragingly, we noticed an increased focus on tackling industry and business waste streams and thoroughly enjoyed understanding how each designer had chosen to take on the challenge.”

“One of our intentions of these awards is educate consumers and businesses on the importance of moving towards circular systems, which has the potential to reduce emissions by one-third. Textile waste starts at the design stage, so Mindful Fashion NZ has devised the Circular Design Awards to inspire and educate the next generation of designers in Aotearoa to rethink their foundational practices and design towards a circular future. If the Supreme winners’ creations are anything to go by, there’s a positive future ahead,” says FitzGerald.

An installation at the event showed just how big a problem textile waste is in New Zealand with a 490kg pile of clothing waste illustrated the volume of clothes we send to landfill every 5 minutes in this country.

Mindful Fashion is using initiatives like the Circular Design Awards to champion the local industry towards a circular future, by following the four action areas and fifteen corresponding recommendations identified in the Threads of Tomorrow report that provide a clear roadmap for the industry.

Delivered in partnership with the Gattung Foundation, the Awards celebrate the best innovation in sustainable design and sustainable business. The Awards educates the next generation of designers to design for circularity from the beginning, and reimagine fashion as waste-free. It showcases the best-practice initiatives from New Zealand businesses who are leading the charge.