Christina Dean: Redress

Christina Dean's journey is a story that moved from the field of medicine to sustainability. She first understood the impact of fashion when she started as a journalist writing about environmental pollution. The more she went into the research, the more she realised the fashion industry was hiding a crisis in plain sight. The mountains of waste, contaminated water, and supply chains built on speed with no responsibility.

That moment of frustration became the beginning of one of the most influential sustainability movements in Asia.

From Surgeon to Sustainability Pioneer

Christina left her medical career as a dental surgeon for journalism, wanting to understand fashion's waste problem. In 2007, she founded Redress, a Hong Kong based environmental NGO dedicated to reducing waste in the fashion industry. It began as a small awareness project, but it transformed into a global force influencing designers, brands, and policymakers.

Her journey since then has been a mix of investigative research and grassroots campaigning. She travelled to factories, landfills, warehouses, and villages across Asia to document the scale of textile waste and the human cost of fast fashion.

What Exactly Is Redress

Redress is far more than a non-profit because it is a systems change engine for the fashion industry.

Redress Design Award (RDA) - The world's largest sustainable fashion design competition. Thousands of emerging designers compete to create circular, low waste, or zero waste garments using rescued textiles. Winners gain global visibility and get to collaborate with major brands.

This is the pipeline producing the next generation of circular fashion leaders.

Clothing Takeback and Sorting Programs - Redress collects unwanted garments from the public, resorts them, repairs them, and feeds them into resale or recycling channels. It creates pathways for textile circularity in a region heavily dominated by fast fashion.

Redress is globally respected for bringing transparency to an industry that has historically been comfortable in exploiting resources.

The R Collective: A New Chapter

In 2017, Christina built a sister brand called The R Collective, a luxury upcycled label that repurposes leftover fabrics from luxury manufacturers into limited edition garments.

This brand exists to use rescued textiles from mills and factories to show that circular fashion can stand shoulder to shoulder with any luxury house in quality and craftsmanship. The R Collective collaborates directly with designers from the Redress Design Award.

Her Global Voice

Christina Dean's work has travelled far beyond Hong Kong because she built something the global fashion world could no longer ignore. 

She co-authored Dress [with] Sense, a practical guide that helps people rethink their closets with purpose, and she has appeared in documentaries that expose the scale of textile waste and the urgency of circular design.

Today she is recognised by sustainability leaders worldwide for creating Asia's first major fashion waste NGO and for standing as a pillar of design activism.

The Challenge She Works On Every Single Day

The fashion industry generates an estimated 92 million tonnes of waste annually.
Most of it never even reaches a consumer. It is shredded, burned, or landfilled at the manufacturing stage.

Christina's work addresses the three biggest barriers:

- Fashion waste operates at a pace that outstrips the planet's limits. Redress created the infrastructure for textile rescue.

- Designers are rarely taught circularity. Redress intervenes early by educating designers before they enter the industry. This compounding effect will change fashion for decades.

- Consumers want change but don't know where to start, so through transparency campaigns and practical tools, she breaks complex sustainability topics into simple steps people can take every day.

Christina has already built the blueprint for circular operations that empowers a generation of designers who do not think of waste as inevitable. And if this change is possible at the design table, why not across the industry?