How Tommy Hilfiger is Inspiring a Circular and Inclusive Future for Fashion
The Beat Asia was privileged to attend the Redress Design Award 2024 Grand Final Fashion Show, exclusively catching up with Finalists and Jessica Wei, the Senior Director of Sustainability, at Tommy Hilfiger Asia Pacific, the program’s Exclusive Fashion Sponsor, to get an inside look into what it will take to build a more circular fashion industry.
Also serving on the judging panel for the 2024 Award, Jessica led workshops for the Finalists educating them on crucial industry knowledge and mediating an eye-opening pitching session. Throughout a week-long program, Jessica, alongside her panel, carefully assessed every element that went into each of the Finalists’ showcase collections, culminating in the Grand Final Fashion Show held on Friday, Sept. 6, 2024.
With a background in building sustainable product and packaging design, alongside implementing circular and renewable operations at Tommy Hilfiger Asia Pacific, Jessica is embedded in the brand’s “Tommy for Tomorrow” targets. Not only did she bring her crucial industry expertise to 2024’s Redress Design Award, but this year’s Winner Tiger Chung will also be working with Tommy Hilfiger to launch a sustainable retail collection in Hong Kong.
Read on as Jessica shares her experiences with the Redress Design Award 2024 and how Tiger will be joining her to influence the more circular fashion industry of tomorrow.
What led to your exclusive fashion sponsorship with Redress this year?
Tommy Hilfiger is committed to inclusivity and sustainability and our vision is a future of fashion that “wastes nothing and welcomes all."
We believe that this ethos aligns with the Redress Design Award, a fantastic competition that nurtures the next generation of circular design talent from different walks of life across the globe and unites them in a vision of sustainable fashion. Our goals are aligned, and Tommy Hilfiger is proud to be the 2024 exclusive fashion sponsor as we strive towards making circularity the industry norm.
What were you looking out for in the Finalists’ collections and what do you look forward to the winner bringing to a sustainable retail project in Tommy Hilfiger?
As a judge, I’ve been looking out for designers who challenge the status quo when it comes to sustainability, whether that’s in material sourcing, circular design technique, or having thought about the life cycle of a piece. What has set the winner apart is superior storytelling through their work.
We are very excited to be working with this year’s winner, Tiger Chung from Hong Kong, and we believe their inspiration and sustainable design techniques will inspire local communities, other designers, and industry alike.
Tiger will be working closely with our sustainability, design, sourcing, and store development teams to bring a unique sustainable collection to life for retail in Hong Kong, and we can’t wait to share this with our consumers!
What has been a positive experience interacting with this year’s Redress Design Awards finalists?
One of the best parts of this competition is that finalists are given several workshopping opportunities, at a manufacturer, at a packaging workshop, and of course, the pitching day with all the judges. Watching them develop through this process has been a rewarding experience!
With circularity at the core of Tommy Hilfiger’s sustainability efforts, what steps are you putting in place in your operations to facilitate building a more sustainable business model?
Our goal is that all of Tommy Hilfiger’s products will contribute to the circular economy by 2030 through design, use, and end-of-life. We are focused on the key pillars of circular design, promoting circular business models to extend use, and end-of-life management.
As about 80% of a product’s environmental footprint is determined in the design stage, we are educating our designers through our circular design guidelines internally and we also have sustainable product guidelines around material choices.
Read more about the Redress Design Award 2024 Grand Final Fashion Show and The Beat Asia's exclusive on Tiger and the other finalists here.
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