Meet the 2025 Semi-finalists

Lucie Albert

Redress Design Award

  • 2025
 Finalist

Meet The Designer

“Sustainability supports the development of ideas, as it encourages you to find new approaches.”
Lucie Albert
“Sustainability supports the development of ideas, as it encourages you to find new approaches.”
Lucie Albert

Bio

Lucie Albert is a Finalist of the Redress Design Award 2025. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Fashion Design from HTW Berlin – University of Applied Sciences, Germany.

Region

  • Germany

Collection

  • Womenswear

Design Techniques

  • Upcycling

Redress Design Award Collection

Lucie’s Redress Design Award collection, ‘Erlkönig’, explores the vast world of the German ballad ‘Der Erlkönig’ by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The individual looks represent figures in the story, with a wide variety of character traits and symbols depicted, from a naive son to a mesmerising daughter. Designing for low environmental impact and inspired by the artist MC Escher, Lucie applies a tessellation technique to durable leather from discarded furniture and factory surplus scraps, ensuring that even the smallest fragments become part of her garments. She then laser-cuts the pieces into patterns, paints, and assembles them with a zigzag seam.

Q&A with the designer

As a teenager, I was deeply influenced by the Fridays for Future movement, which shaped my environmental awareness early on. At the same time, I had a strong passion for fashion — and that created a real inner conflict. I started questioning how fashion could exist in harmony with sustainability and was inspired by designers like Stella McCartney, who began shifting the focus of the industry toward more conscious production.

That tension became a driving force behind my decision to start creating fashion myself — not only to express my creativity, but also to explore the systemic issues within the industry and imagine new ways of doing things. For me, sustainable design is both a creative and critical act: a chance to rethink materials, reshape aesthetics, and push fashion toward a more responsible future.

For my collection, I developed a concept that focuses on reusing leather offcuts and small-scale waste. I was inspired by the mathematical beauty of M.C. Escher’s tessellations, which sparked the idea to transform irregular leather scraps into structured, intentional designs. I began sourcing leather offcuts from local workshops that would otherwise discard them, acquiring the material at no cost while actively preventing the waste of leather, a resource that is both energy-intensive to produce and ethically problematic due to its link to animal suffering.

The leather I use comes from a local company that already upcycles old leather furniture and garments, meaning the material has already undergone one circular transformation. My design concept takes that process a step further by ensuring that even the smallest remnants from this upcycling process are not discarded, but instead integrated into a new aesthetic.

What makes this approach uniquely sustainable is that it embraces waste on the tiniest level, while still aiming for a high-end visual outcome. I want the pieces to look deliberate and refined — not like typical patchwork, but like something sculpted and precise. The tessellation-inspired pattern plays a key role in that. I’m also currently exploring how to adapt this method to other waste materials like wool felt offcuts, expanding the potential of this system.

My future in sustainable fashion feels very open, and I’m excited by the range of possibilities it holds. I dream of developing my current design concept into a brand, perhaps focusing on accessories, and bringing it to a wider audience. At the same time, I can see myself working within an existing fashion house, especially in a creative team environment, possibly even in haute couture, where craftsmanship and storytelling play such a central role.

Beyond design, I’m also deeply interested in the systemic side of fashion. I could imagine working in a more political or strategic context, developing new ideas and frameworks for how we consume and engage with fashion in a more sustainable way. I’m not yet sure what the job title for that would be, but I know I want to be part of shaping a more responsible industry, whether through design, collaboration, or policy.

I almost always carry a camera with me, in addition to my phone. Sometimes it’s an analog camera, sometimes a small digital one, or even an instant camera. I love capturing moments more intentionally that way, collecting them like little memories rather than just snapping endless photos on my phone. It helps me stay present and appreciate the beauty in everyday details.

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