In the summer of 2008, three women met over lunch to discuss eco-fashion. At the end of that lunch date, the idea of Redress Raleigh was born.
The annual eco-fashion show encourages designers to consider the impact on the environment in the creation of their designs, according to Beth Stewart. Stewart is a co-producer of the event and a graduate student in textile management and technology.
“We want to encourage the public to recognize that eco-fashion is no longer the hippie dresses of the past, and we also want to provide a forum for the designers,” Stewart said.
The event, which will take place Friday and Saturday, has a special connection to Earth Week.
“We have started partnering the past couple years with Planet Earth Celebrations, which is co-owned by the City of Raleigh and the Museum of Natural Sciences,” Stewart said. “We thought it was a very good collaboration for publicity reasons, for them and for us. We agree with what they’re supporting too, obviously — Earth Day.”
This year the show will feature 13 designers, and Stewart said there is always a variety of styles on display.
“We encourage designers to take the mission of the show and do with it what they will,” Stewart said. “There’s one girl this year that will be doing these mod, cute little dresses out of old-school bed sheets…. There’s other people who will find things like remnants of an upholstery store or they do a lot of deconstructing and then reconstructing of things, like finding stuff at Goodwill and then making it into something else.”
Moran Aframian, a co-producer of Redress Raleigh and a graduate student in textile management and technology, said all of the designers are unique in their own way.
“We have anyone ranging from high school students to established designers,” Aframian said. “We have a lot of fun summer clothes, because it’s finally spring here. There are some really unique techniques, like a mix of different textures and innovation in textiles and of recycling textiles.”
After the show on Friday, the producers have planned events for Saturday to get the community involved, such as a “Redress Remix” fashion show, an open-air bazaar for visitors to shop and an after-party at the Busy Bee Café.
“People can come shop all the designs they see on the runway,” Aframian said. “Whoever comes out to the show, I hope they see that this is a community-based organization and that a lot of what we’re doing is to highlight the talent that we have this year in our area and encourage the spread of resources.”
Stewart said one of the things Redress Raleigh wants to do is to become more involved with the community and help educate people about eco-fashion.
“We’re hoping to do more things like workshops. We did a screen printing event recently — that seemed to be pretty well-received,” Stewart said. “We want to do more stuff like that, where people learn some of the things they can do to embellish their clothes or to do things that are eco-fashion-related.”
Aframian said she does a lot of networking for Redress Raleigh and is the “big picture idea” kind of person in the organization.
“As co-producers, we oversee all the different tasks that have to happen,” Aframian said. “We try to inspire people and have some distant future goal we’re trying to achieve.”
Part of the Redress Raleigh fashion show proceeds will go to MorLove, a non-profit organization started by Aframian that looks for ways to do programs to help children in poverty and provide means for them to have a more enriched life.
