Redress founder Christina Dean on the progress of Hong Kong’s fashion industry, the urgency surrounding its transformation and how many of its problems are in our hands
Christina Dean is running out of patience. And rightly so. The founder of Redress, a Hong Kong-based NGO that strives to change the way we consume clothes, has seen the destruction caused by the fashion industry first-hand—namely indescribable amounts of waste.
Despite Dean’s efforts, the levels of waste in Hong Kong seem to be rising. In 2016, approximately 125,195 tonnes of textiles were sent into Hong Kong’s landfills—and this number is not yet showing signs of slowing down.
More to the point, most of this textile waste is unnecessary. Shirts are thrown away because they are missing a button. There’s the skirt discarded for its broken zipper, a dress dumped because its hem has dropped or that t-shirt abandoned for a small stain. The average person buys 60 per cent more items of clothing and keeps them for half as long as they did just 15 years ago.
To prove that clothes such as these didn’t need to be thrown away, Dean embarked on The 365 Challenge in 2013, where she took discarded clothes and wore them, each day something different, to show that she could.