Mushroom T-shirts and dissolvable thread: H&M opens the vote for its Global Change Award

H&M has announced the winners of its 2018 Global Change Award, and the company is asking the public to help it decide how to divide the prize money.

The fashion retailer has selected five out-there sustainable fashion concepts to share the title of the third annual competition, and the results are as wacky as they are impressive.

The winners include ‘Crop-A-Porter,' which fabricates sustainable bio-textiles by using leftovers from food crop harvests such as flaxseeds, sugarcane and pineapples, and ‘Algae Apparel,' which transforms algae into bio-fiber and eco-friendly dye that has benefits for the skin. ‘Fungi Fashion' is a project that custom makes clothes from decomposable mushroom roots, while ‘The Regenerator' separates cotton and polyester blends for the repurposing of clothes. The final winner is ‘Smart Stitch,' which has created a dissolvable thread that makes repairing and recycling easier than ever.

The winners will split a grant of €1million, awarded by the non-profit H&M Foundation. The eventual winnings of each project will be decided via an online vote, which will remain open through March 16.

"How we manage and consume resources will be crucial for the lives of present and future gene­rations," said Karl-Johan Persson, Board member H&M Foundation and CEO H & M Hennes & Mauritz AB, in a statement. "All industries need to re-think, innovate and challenge status quo. Creative innovations are key to make this shift, and I congratulate the Global Change Awards winners who all have the power to help reinvent the fashion industry, enabling products and resources to be cycled instead of just having one single life."

The annual Global Change Award puts sustainable fashion in the spotlight and aims to encourage ‘a circular fashion industry' by offering the winners a grant and access to a one-year innovation accelerator provided by the H&M Foundation in collaboration with Accenture and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm
The results of the vote, as well as the teams behind the winning concepts, will be announced in Stockholm on March 20. To vote online, see globalchangeaward.com