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On 22 May, Vogue Business hosted the Visa Young Creators: Recycle the Runway Awards at The Steel Yard in London. The partnership saw Vogue Business and Visa come together to celebrate the incoming generation of designers and fashion creatives embracing circularity. Following a rigorous adjudication process, which included judges from Visa, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, University of the Arts London (UAL), the British Fashion Council (BFC) and artist and social media sensation Sophie Tea, six winners were selected. Among them was grand prize winner Genaro Rivas, a Peruvian fashion designer whose business model centres on supporting little-known artisanal weavers from his home country and collaborators around the world. The designer’s circular vision embraces the principles of resale, repair and rewear, while proposing a unique method for estimating fair wages in designer-artisan collaborations. Winners each receive mentorship from leading industry experts and a sum of £3,000, with grand prize winner Rivas awarded £5,000 to support the continued growth of his business.
During the Recycle the Runway Awards night, Vogue Business head of custom insights Anusha Couttigane hosted a panel discussion focusing on circularity with a cohort of fashion experts. Guest speakers included Emma Mercier Jones, global head of commercial excellence at Mulberry; Sara Elkholy, programme director for the BFC’s Circular Fashion Innovation Network (CFIN); and Bianca-Francesca Foley, founder of eco media platform Sustainably Influenced.
Funding the future
The panel laid out the context of the evening by discussing the need for continued investment when it comes to scaling circular business models. Elkholy was particularly passionate. “We definitely have to talk about investment and money. I think we all know in this room that, particularly in circular fashion, public and private investment does have to increase,” she said. “We have to attract investment, we have to make it sexy and we all need to work together to figure out how we get funds dedicated here.” Elkholy expanded on the impact of funding on the CFIN in enabling cross-sector collaboration and thinking, as well as the added benefit of bringing together a cluster of voices advocating for change, rather than solo voices attempting to beat the drum for sustainability.
Foley cautioned against a shift in industry attitudes whereby sustainability has gone from a “need to have” to a “nice to have”. For Foley, however, there remains a real need to make infrastructural support available to emerging designers. She spoke about economies of scale and the availability of shared resources, studios and machinery that can make a real difference to their ability to “design for longevity”.
Humanising circularity
Foley also stressed the importance of communication to the consumer, including crafting stronger narratives around circularity and considering the craftspeople making the clothes. “Storytelling is about people,” she said. “We talk about the environment, we talk about the planet, but so often we tend to leave people out of that conversation. We need to humanise the fashion supply chain and make people very much aware that there are real people making their clothes.”
Mercier-Jones built on this, highlighting the challenges that even established brands such as Mulberry face when rolling out eco-first initiatives. Launched in 2020, the Mulberry Exchange programme sees Mulberry buy bags back from its customers, authenticate and rejuvenate them in its carbon-neutral Lifetime Service Centre in Somerset, and resell them to create a circular supply chain. “At the beginning, it was a project; but if I look at it now, we think of our resale very much as a channel,” Mercier-Jones said. “A channel needs infrastructure, it needs support and resources, but when we started out we didn’t have people or budget, so we were all doing it as part of our other day-to-day roles.”
The winners
Following the panel discussion, Visa VP of social impact and sustainability Katherine Brown interviewed the six winners of the Recycle the Runway competition. The finalists — Gbadebo, Fanfare Label, Marinava, Sondor, Been and Genaro Rivas — saw their work showcased throughout the archways of The Steel Yard, in an immersive fashion experience.
Gbadebo founder Kemi Gbadebo shared how necessity fuelled an unexpected switch to sustainable approaches. “I would love to say that I started with sustainability in mind, but if I’m honest, I started in lockdown when all of the fabric stores were shut,” the designer shared. “There was no way to get fabric, but I needed new textiles, so I started going through my wardrobe and reworking things. I was also selling my designs on Depop and people started labelling me as a sustainable designer. So I started thinking about what that meant if I was going to champion that label and fulfil that name.”
For grand prize winner Rivas, the journey began with wanting to create a form of employment for female knitters in Peru who were struggling to feed their families during the pandemic. This small venture evolved to working with six teams of artisans harnessing various skills, from rugmaking to weaving. More recently, Rivas has collaborated with designers across the UK, including fellow winner and Been founder, Genia Mineeva.
Discussing pieces from a collaboration with Wimbledon-based designer Evyn Gensurowsky, Rivas said: “We created this raffia collection using sustainable dye. All the denim is circular, made by using the least amount of water possible; all the patterns are zero waste. There are some Alpaca jackets that I brought from my home country Peru, and took the textiles from that, which is something that’s really important to me because if I don’t act as an ambassador where I live now for my country and I don’t bring these materials and start these conversations, then how am I going to create opportunities for other designers?”
“I firmly believe that fashion should fulfil a purpose,” Rivas added, “and that purpose should not just be aesthetic and making beautiful clothing, but also generating a positive impact in the life of others.”
A wealth of ideas around regeneration and reuse emerged, with Murtz Khattak, founder of jewellery label Sondor, describing his favourite projects as ones where customers bring him bespoke pieces, which have been passed down, for melting or reconstituting. Meanwhile, Mineeva spoke of how her brand was born out of the waste problem that stems from clothing donations. “Can I make something — a product — entirely from waste and can it look like something me or my friends would like and want to buy?” she recalled asking herself. “So, what is the stuff that can no longer be recycled or regenerated and is there anything we can do there?” Today, Been products are made with 75 per cent recycled material, and by using waste materials, the brand cuts its carbon footprint by roughly 80 per cent in the production process.
Fanfare Label founder Esther Knight shared her journey from buyer to designer, discussing her time at more premium brands such as Barbour and Vivienne Westwood, which embrace circularity, and how this contrasted with the high street players she’d also worked for. This gap in the way brands operate responsibly inspired her to launch her own denim label. “Denim is one of the worst culprits within the industry. I started upcycling initially, with circular principles from day one,” Knight said.
Visa’s Brown ended the interviews with enthusiasm for what the winners represent: “It is a huge leap for some people to go from what is easy, what is innate and what we’ve learnt from previous generations to something that is new and reflective of self. I’m very optimistic about younger generations and how they think. I intend to live, shop and wear my values. So you [the designers] are in the right place at the right time; you’re the generation that is ready to do this.”
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This article has been updated with Wimbledon-based designer Evyn Gensurowsky s name.
