Have you ever thought that cigarette butts can be your garment? At the JD Design Awards 2022, we witnessed the collection Resurrection that has been curated out of discarded cigarette butts. Fascinating? Let’s have a look at several data related to the tobacco industry.

Every year the tobacco industry costs the world more than 8 million human lives, 600 million trees, 200 000 hectares of land, 22 billion tonnes of water, and 84 million tonnes of CO2. Tobacco products are the most littered item on the planet, containing over 7000 toxic chemicals, which leech into our environment when discarded. Roughly 4.5 trillion cigarette filters pollute our oceans, rivers, city sidewalks, parks, soil, and beaches every year. Cigarette filters contain microplastics and make up the second-highest form of plastic pollution worldwide.

The future designers graduating from the JD Institute of Fashion Technology Bangalore have used recycled cigarettes butts to make their first sustainable fashion collection? The budding Designers: Athira Anandan, Trivedi Supraja and Anaswara S Mohan pursuing their Diploma in Fashion Design have designed their collection, Resurrection using Cellulose Acetate. This fiber is made out of recycled cigarette butts.

Sync with nature was the theme of this year’s JD Design Awards, which highlighted the need for a sustainable and futuristic approach to fashion. The collection, Resurrection is a classic High-end streetwear collection with the use of subtle color scheme.

When asked about their choice, the designer says, “Not many people are aware or realize the impacts that cigarette butts have on our environment. That is something that we wanted to educate the general audience and also work on finding a solution to the problem”.

Their fabric is a blend of recycled cigarette butt (cellulose acetate) fiber and recycled polyester fiber. Lots of time was invested to create their fabric and the designers had to go through a lot to convince the artisans. The fibers were spun into yarn and then weaved to form a fabric by a group of skilled traditional handloom weavers. Communicating and convincing the artisans was the difficult part as this has never been done before. Various techniques like spinning and weaving were done since they made the fabric from scratch. Their target market is Europe as their collection was Autumn-Winter wear with a lot of tailored trench coats, suits, blazers, and minimal winter jackets. What we loved about their collection was how they experimented on the lapel, still maintaining the classic silhouette.

The collection consisted of three menswear and six women wear garments, which is ideal for the young working crowd and influencers. The Resurrection ensemble also received the Best Innovative Collection Award by JD Design Awards 2022

Collection

Words By: Harish S Ramanathan

Batch: MA in Fashion Communication