Anna Schuster is a finalist of the Redress Design Award 2019, the world’s largest sustainable fashion design competition. Anna has an MA in Fashion Futures from London College of Fashion and a BA in Fashion Design from Mediadesign Hochschule München. She is currently working as a Menswear Concept Design Intern at Hugo Boss.
“I am ready to challenge the current fashion industry model to prove that fashion and nature can exist in harmony. We are taking too much from the planet and I want to give back to nature through innovative design thinking and creativity”. - Anna Schuster
Gallery
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For her Redress Design Award Collection ‘Anna meets X’, Anna is influenced by what surrounds her as a designer, taking inspiration from other ‘maker’s’ disciplines through the discovery of crafts such as crochet, repair and patch working. She applies zero-waste, up-cycling and reconstruction techniques to manipulate various types of surplus, damaged and stained textile waste and yarns into her contemporary menswear collection.
Ideas of collaboration and connection sit at the heart of Anna Schuster’s thoughtful collection for the Redress Design Award 2019.
“‘Anna meets X’ goes beyond trends and aesthetics and focuses on the humans and materials that surround me as a designer,” she explains. “Each outfit is inspired by another discipline - such as watchmaking, crochet and screen-printing - to look beyond mass production techniques.” This outward focus is characteristic of Anna’s work.
“I am interested in traditional craftsmanship and also how technology can improve our work process. I love developing interdisciplinary collaborations with the aim of re-using resources and discovering textile techniques and innovative materials.”
Dead-stock, leftover fabrics and yarns and even stained, damaged materials influenced the pattern cutting and colourways of her collection. “Instead of trend analysis, the first step was materials sourcing,” Anna says. “This allowed me to adapt the silhouettes according to zero-waste principles.” The designer has an MA in Fashion Futures from London College of Fashion and is currently working as a Menswear Concept Design Assistant at Hugo Boss.
Redress 2019 finalist Anna Schuster explains her runway collection 'Anna meets X'
The collection:
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Anna’s aim is to create sophisticated wardrobe essentials that can be worn by both men and women, exchanged with friends and family or resold. Patterns are straightforward, allowing them to be constructed again and again from whatever fabric waste is available. “Fashion has clearly lost its value,” says Anna.
“The fashion industry needs to stop overwhelming people with garments. My aim is to bring back an appreciation for crafts and materials into everyday fashion. I want to prove that fashion and nature can work together. We are taking too much from the planet and I want to give back to nature through design thinking and creativity. To act sustainably is not a limitation; it’s an opportunity for innovation.”
About the Redress Design Award
The Redress Design Award (formerly the EcoChic Design Award) is the world’s largest sustainable fashion design competition. Organised by Redress, the competition works to educate emerging fashion designers around the world about sustainable design theories and techniques in order to drive growth towards a circular fashion system. By putting sustainable design talent in the global spotlight, the competition creates a unique platform for passionate and talented fashion game-changers to transform the global fashion industry and rewards the best with career-changing prizes to maximise long-term impact.
Each competition cycle takes participants on an educational journey lasting several theory and design-packed months. They work to educate designers about fashion’s negative environmental impacts, whilst inspiring them to use the core sustainable design techniques of zero-waste, up-cycling and reconstruction to cut waste out of fashion. Through their lectures, Academies, online LEARN platform and educational work in partnership with more than 100 universities around the world, they provide young designers with the theory and techniques to help them understand the new circular economy and capitalise on its global potential for the fashion industry.
In 2018, after seven highly successful cycles, the competition re-launched with a fresh new look and name change: Previously known as the EcoChic Design Award, the new Redress Design Award directly reflects the work of Redress itself and our overarching mission to reduce textile waste and ultimately fuel a circular system for fashion.