Junk Kouture - empowering young people through creativity and sustainability
by Startacus Admin
The lowdown on Junk Kouture, the Irish-based global platform that's on a mission to unleash the creative brilliance of young people
We live in a society that is often lacking tolerance for the creative, that thinks that rather than painting or writing, we should all get a ‘proper’ job. We only need to look at the UK government’s adverts trying to get more people to train in cybersecurity. Depicting people like dancers with the slogan ‘Rethink. Reskill. Reboot.’, the suggestion was of course that people in the arts should stop being in the arts and get a real job.
Thankfully, there are still enough people out there who care about protecting the arts and those therein and the adverts were ridiculed out of existence, but this subtle push to abandon the arts still needs to be fought against, and that is done by encouragement and support.
Irish-based Junk Kouture is a global platform to do just this, unleashing, they say, ‘the creative brilliance of young people’, to ‘enrich and empower the lives of young people through creativity and sustainability’.
One of the ways that it does this is through fashion competitions for designers, engineers, artists, and performers to put on a show incorporating high-end couture designed and created from recycled junk. Showcasing designers aged 12-18, the startup’s rule is that everything must be 100% recycled, and it uses the platform to help young people drive the message of climate change and the need for a sustainable future.
Junk Kouture put on a competition from January to April this year, across the UK and Ireland, after COVID disrupted their 2020 efforts, and it’s just ramping up to the World Final, which aims to be the Eurovision of young sustainable fashion and creativity. In September this year, the competition will start online in London, Milan, New York, Paris, and Dubai; then in 2022, more shows will be put on in Tokyo, Auckland, Sydney, Sao Paolo, Los Angeles, Cape Town, and Singapore; and as life settles and we get back to normal, live shows will be hosted around the world. Finally, in 2022, 10 finalists each from Ireland, the UK, Italy, America, France, and the UAE will compete in the final, vying for the title of ‘Junk Kouture World Designer of the Year’.
This latest push into worldwide markets was made possible thanks to a seed round of €840,000. One of the participants of the round, Justin Cullen, former chief digital officer of Core Media, has also become Junk Kouture’s executive chairman.
A fabulous platform like Junk Kouture doesn’t just help highlight the need to fight climate change of course - a glance at the world around us right now in July makes this painfully obvious - but it helps boost young people’s creativity and confidence, giving them an outlet that can be of great benefit to their mental health as well as their development.
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Published on: 26th July 2021
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