Keyla Cabral, Sofía Church and Alba Izaguirre, students of the Degree in Fashion Design at UDIT, University of Design, Innovation and Technology, have been selected as finalists in the fourth edition of the Greenwalk Awards, a sustainable fashion competition for new talents.
Keyla Cabral has been recognised thanks to her project 'Mistura', in which she reflects how African music has been a fundamental influence on global music, celebrating its rhythms, songs and structures.
This colourful look is based on a sustainable vision based on craftsmanship, emotion and the re-signification of materials. And it has been made entirely from a mesh fabric intervened with more than 20,000 flanges placed by hand one by one and also dyed by hand, recreating the print of a picture painted by the young designer's father.
For her part, Sofía Church has been selected with the proposal 'Oblivions', an exploration of what disappears and what is not said. This project arises as an intimate reflection on loss, absence and the traces left by what is no longer there.
Inspired by avant-grade, the piece combines contrast and contradiction: rigid structures, such as the corset, its main element, coexist with ethereal transparencies. With sustainability as a structural pillar, the corset is entirely made of biodegradable PLA using a 3D pen and incorporates a biomaterial specifically designed for the project, while the lower part is composed of fabrics from second-hand garments.
Finally, Alba Izaguirre has been classified as a finalist thanks to her project 'Swans: An Atmospheric Error', which imagines the creation of a hybrid figure between human and bird. The designer was inspired by an observation that she herself describes as ironic: how, by appropriating the image of birds, humans generate kitsch aesthetics that are as artificial as they are attractive.
Thus, without resorting to materials of animal origin, she has created a voluminous and soft silhouette, which floats between the organic and the artificial, with a sustainable approach. In fact, for its manufacture, Alba Izaguirre has prioritised the use of existing resources, such as a towel transformed through a process of upcycling, which has been used to create the front piece.