Buenos Aires - Some 44 Chilean designers and artisans are taking part in the Runway Fashion Design challenge, a programme that seeks to reuse garments from textile dumps in the Tarapacá Region, giving them a new life through fashion collections.

Runway Fashion Design Tarapacá Circular and Sustainable was created by Johana Fernández, a commercial engineer with a diploma in the fashion industry and fashion and luxury communication, with the aim of highlighting "the importance of creating programmes that promote slow fashion, conscious consumption and the education and visibility of those brands that compete in the fashion industry, with little success compared to those that occupy almost 90 percent of the market and are globally recognised", explained the organisation in a press release.

A Chilean programme works with designers and artisans to create collections with textile waste from Tarapacá. Credits: Runway Fashion Design.

Collections with textile waste

In Tarapacá, a group of artisans and designers worked in pairs to turn textile waste into fashion collections, as a way of promoting the circular economy. For more than three months, they have rescued some 242 kilos of garments from the textile dump, ready to be transformed into new fashion proposals.

The presentation of these collections will take place in the format of an international catwalk on 12 April at Cavancha beach, on the coastline of the commune of Iquique. There, a jury, composed of Spanish designers Juan Carlos Mesa, Ágatha Ruiz de la Prada and Jesús Reyes, along with four national experts, the programme's director, Johana Fernández; designers Cris Miranda and Lupe Gajardo; the director of Andes Fashion Week, Leticia Faviani; and marine biologist, Paola Nelson, will be in charge of selecting the winning duo. The winners will show their proposals at Andes Fashion Week, in Santiago de Chile, and the best collections will have the chance to go on sale on international platforms.

Credits: Runway Fashion Design

"This challenge is an opportunity to completely change the way we deal with the textile problem in Chile," explained Marcela González, one of the participants in the project.

For her part, the director, Johana Fernández, points out the importance of the programme and of activities such as going to textile micro-dumps to rescue garments for the creation of the collections. "[The participants] have found clothes that are in good condition, practically new, where they haven't even taken off the tags to throw them away. Garments abandoned in the desert that were never sold. RFD takes care of part of the problem, giving a new value to these clothes through creativity, achieving a high-level collection," Fernández stated.

This article originally appeared on FashionUnited.ES. Translation and edit by: Rachel Douglass.