PUMA and Collina Strada have unveiled their responses to the GFA Designer Challenge 2023. The GFA Designer Challenge is an initiative about creating sustainable design processes from original idea to final product: matching style and ingenuity with solutions. PUMA and Collina Strada have released their GFA Designer Challenge 2023 videos.
PUMA and Nicole McLaughlin
Less than one percent of textile waste is recycled into new fibres suitable for the fashion industry. The Global Fashion Agenda says that this represents a loss of more than $100 billion worth of materials each year. The bulk of textile waste is disposed of in landfills, downcycled, or incinerated.
Heiko Desens, the global creative director of PUMA, partnered with Nicole McLaughlin to find solutions to the challenge of reducing waste from the supply chain through upcycling material cut-offs. The challenge 'Sweep the Factory Floor' spans McLaughlin's New York studio and the PUMA headquarters in Bayern, Germany, to show the creatives at work.
PUMA and Nicole McLaughlin will utilize clothing production scraps and cutoff to manufacture sneakers. Because the scrap and cutoff vary in sizes, shapes, and colours, the sneakers will be their own unique design.
"Sweeping the factory floor is the guiding message for me personally," says Nicole McLaughlin in her and PUMA's video. "I think trying to get every little scrap, all those odd bits that would traditionally just end up in the trash, that is my goal."
Hillary Taymour and Collina Strada
Hillary Taymour, the creative director of Collina Strada, partnered with CIRCULOSE which offers a new material made by recycling cotton from worn-out clothes and production waste. With at least two-thirds of a brand's environmental footprint attributed to its choice of raw materials, fabrics such as CIRCULOSE offer an alternative to high-impact virgin fossil-fuel-based materials. The material was produced by the fabric mill Beste.
The video 'Reimagining the Use of Materials for Bags' follows Hillary Taymour in New York as she tackles the challenge surrounding materials, bringing in solution-led insights from the CIRCULOSE team in Sundsvall, Sweden. Taymour uses the material to reimagine a handbag with vibrant prints and colours that would not have been achievable with leather.
"Our designer challenge for this piece was to reimagine what a handbag looks like not using leather," says Taymour. "I teamed up with CIRCULOSE which is great because everything they make is from . . . garbage. We're just trying to solve what it looks like to make it [handbags] from waste."
The GFA Designer Challenge
The GFA Designer Challenges with PUMA and Collina Strada will be showcased at the Global Fashion Summit: Copenhagen Edition from June 27 to 28.
A third film that follows Julius Juul, global creative director of the Scandinavian brand HELIOT EMIL, will also be released in September 2023.
"With the environmental impact of a garment largely determined in its design phase, design decisions have the power to significantly influence resource use, purchasing, and usage behaviour," says Federica Marchionni, CEO of Global Fashion Agenda. "Our GFA Designer Challenge is therefore intended to fuse talented creatives with promising innovations and we are honoured to have the support of key partners to make this year's challenge even more impactful."
