From textile waste to runway: Redress Design Award 2026 opens public vote for the next generation of sustainable fashion designers

HONG KONG SAR – Media OutReach Newswire – 26 August 2026 – Redress, the Asia-focused environmental NGO dedicated to reducing clothing's negative environmental impacts since 2007, is calling on consumers worldwide to vote online for their favourite Finalist in the Redress Design Award 2026, the world's leading sustainable fashion design competition. Voting for the People's Choice Award is open until 31 August 2026, with the winner to be announced at the Grand Final Fashion Show in Hong Kong on 2 September.

From textile waste to runway: Redress design award 2026 opens public vote for the next generation of sustainable fashion designers

The Finalists' collections showcase innovative approaches to tackling textile waste, transforming discarded leather offcuts, secondhand hardware and industrial waste through reconstruction and upcycling techniques, while exploring next-generation materials such as biodegradable fruit leather and ethical non-livestock wool to reimagine raw materials for circular fashion.

Organised by Redress and supported by the Cultural and Creative Industries Development Agency (CCIDA) of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region as Lead Sponsor, the Redress Design Award invites the public to discover the tactile beauty of circular fashion through its latest photoshoot and cast their votes to champion sustainable fashion while empowering the next generation of circular design talents.

The photoshoot: sensory storytelling

Photographed by acclaimed Hong Kong creative Paul Sunga with hair by Davines and makeup by MakeupBees, the photoshoot celebrates the creative decisions behind each Finalist's collection, highlighting the unique textures, craftsmanship and natural imperfections of their materials while underscoring why design matters: 80% of a garment's environmental impact is determined at the design stage^[1].

"The Finalists of the Redress Design Award are proving that thoughtful design can transform textile waste into something beautiful. Getting up close to these garments, you see how every material choice, texture and technique tells a story, reminding us that the biggest opportunity to reduce fashion's environmental impact begins at the design stage. I can't wait for people to discover these collections through the photoshoot and vote for their favourite," says photoshoot photographer Paul Sunga.

The Finalists' collections are transported from overseas to Hong Kong for the photoshoot and upcoming Grand Final using DHL Express' GoGreen Plus service. This service helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions through a Book & Claim mechanism, where the environmental attributes of Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) are allocated to participating shipments. Made from alternative raw materials with a lower-emission energy profile, such as used cooking oil, waste and hydrogen, SAF can reduce the air transport shipments' lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions by around 80 percent compared with conventional jet fuel.

Find out who wins at the grand final show

The People's Choice Award winner will be announced at the Redress Design Award 2026 Grand Final Fashion Show, along with the coveted first prize including a week-long trip to the UK to connect with leading voices in sustainable fashion through a visit to Simple Approach's Manchester operations to gain insight into responsible fashion design, development, and manufacturing, and an intensive experience with the team at luxury womenswear brand Roksanda to work on an upcycling design project.

The Redress Design Award 2026 Grand Final Fashion Show is open to an exclusive in-person audience and will be livestreamed globally on 2 September 2026 (Wednesday), at 5pm HKT / 11am CET via Facebook and WeChat. Save the date here.

Alumni showcase at centrestage open to public

Redress will also present a total of six Redress Alumni brands as part of both the Grand Final Fashion Show, and at a showcase of Alumni brands at CENTRESTAGE in Hong Kong from 2–5 September 2026 (Wednesday–Saturday, 11am–7pm) supported by DHL. Industry professionals and the public alike are all welcome to come, meet designers, and see up close their sustainable, waste-reducing collections.

The Redress Design Award 2026 Photoshoot Credits

• Photographer: Paul Sunga
• Models: Pak Yan Wong (Self Management Hong Kong), Max Holmström (Primo Management Ltd)
• Creative Stylist: Matthieu Amelin
• Hair: Henry Tse for Davines
• Make-up: Cindy Lai for MakeupBees
• Production: Katt Bidegain, Charly Cheung, Nancy Liu
• Studio: Soho House Hong Kong
• Lighting: Ming Suet
• BTS videographer: Jimmy Yu
• BTS photographer: Nicky Chan

Hashtag: #Redress

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.

Redress

Redress (www.redress.com.hk) is a Hong Kong-based, Asia-focused environmental NGO with a mission to accelerate the change to a circular fashion industry by educating and empowering designers and consumers so as to reduce clothing's negative environmental impacts.

The Redress Design Award

Cultural and Creative Industries Development Agency (CCIDA)

Disclaimer: The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region provides funding support to the project only, and does not otherwise take part in the project. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in these materials/events (or by members of the project team) are those of the project organisers only and do not reflect the views of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the Culture, Sports and Tourism Bureau, the Cultural and Creative Industries Development Agency, the CreateSmart Initiative Secretariat or the CreateSmart Initiative Vetting Committee.

** This press release is distributed by Media OutReach Newswire through automated distribution system, for which the client assumes full responsibility. **

Built by AI Rudder, CALL-E asks the user before every call and reports back with proof of what was agreed.

SAN FRANCISCO, US – Media OutReach Newswire – 13 November 2026 – AI Rudder, the Singapore-headquartered company behind more than 80 billion AI calls, has launched CALL-E, which lets AI agents make real phone calls on their users' behalf. CALL-E works inside ChatGPT, in personal AI agents such as Muse, OpenClaw and Hermes Agent, and in AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Codex and Cursor.

Personal AI agents are growing fast. Meta's Muse passed five million US downloads in its first three weeks, and Grok Bot, from Elon Musk's SpaceX, reached 400,000 weekly users in its first month. Both are piloting phone calls, and users now try to hand their AI agent the calls they used to make themselves: moving a dinner booking, chasing the dry cleaner.

CALL-E is built for those calls. A personal AI agent hands it the errand, and CALL-E makes the call and reports back with proof.

"The smartest AI model in the world can still fail a phone call. All it takes is one 'mm-hmm'," said Teng Ren, CEO of AI Rudder.

"Say your AI agent calls a restaurant to move your booking to a specific time. The restaurant host says 'mm-hmm' to agree, and your agent stops mid-sentence, as if she'd asked a question. Then she says, 'Tuesday at... let me check,' and your agent cuts in with 'Great, Tuesday it is,' to a time she did not give. These behaviours are unnatural to a human, so she knows she's talking to AI and hangs up.

"An AI agent earns the right to speak for us when it reads every 'yes', every pause and every interruption the way a person on the phone would, and answers the way that person would."

A call can't be unsent. CALL-E builds an approval step into the product: each call goes ahead only after the user approves that exact plan, so a call nobody approved never rings.

Phone calls are messier than chat. People pause halfway through an order number, talk over the agent, or cut in mid-sentence. AI Rudder's engineers handle this in the code around the AI model, which decides what the model hears and what it remembers saying.

On the TurnBench Interruption leaderboard, Helm Swift, the AI Rudder model that tells CALL-E when a caller is cutting in, has the joint-lowest false-positive rate of any qualifying model, so it rarely stops talking just because a caller says "yeah" (TurnBench, October 2026).

An agent can report "Booked for 7pm" and still have misheard the time. So after each call, CALL-E reports what was agreed, how confident it is that it met the goal, and the exact lines from the call that back it up, so the user can check it.

By default, a CALL-E call introduces itself as CALL-E, a voice agent. The user can change what it says, and a pre-check stops a call from posing as the FBI or 911.

Regulators are moving the same way. In its 2024 Declaratory Ruling (FCC 24-17), the FCC clarified that AI-generated voices fall within the definition of artificial or prerecorded voices under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, making such calls subject to applicable regulatory requirements, including consent and caller identification obligations. Separately, Article 50 of the EU AI Act requires that people be told they are talking to an AI.

An agent that calls for you carries your phone number and the details of your errand, so the line it uses has to keep both safe. CALL-E runs on the same technology as AI Rudder's enterprise solutions, which are built to meet SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001, alongside GDPR and PDPA requirements. Every call keeps a record from plan to result, with the approval and the evidence attached, so a disputed call can be traced.

CALL-E is available at https://www.heycall-e.com/, where new users start with 100 free credits.

Hashtag: #AIRudder

https://www.linkedin.com/company/airudder/
CALL-E on X: https://x.com/heycalle

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.

About CALL-E

CALL-E lets an AI agent make real phone calls for the person it works for: it plans the call, waits for the user's approval, makes the call and reports back with proof of what was said. CALL-E is built by Singapore-headquartered AI Rudder, which is backed by investors including Tiger Global and Peak XV Partners.

** This press release is distributed by Media OutReach Newswire through automated distribution system, for which the client assumes full responsibility. **

Illustration: a personal AI agent makes calls for its user with CALL-E. (Image: AI Rudder)