Meet the 2025 Semi-finalists

Heyun Pan

Redress Design Award

  • 2025
 Finalist

Meet The Designer

“As designers, we not only have to think about what consumers like about clothes, but also how to avoid wasting resources to create a better ecological environment.”
Heyun Pan
“As designers, we not only have to think about what consumers like about clothes, but also how to avoid wasting resources to create a better ecological environment.”
Heyun Pan

Bio

Heyun Pan is a Finalist of the Redress Design Award 2025. He holds a master’s degree in Fashion Design Technology (Menswear) from London College for Design and Fashion, UK, and a bachelor’s degree in Fashion Design (Menswear) from Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology, China.

Region

  • Mainland China

Collection

  • Menswear

Design Techniques

  • Upcycling

Redress Design Award Collection

Heyun’s Redress Design Award collection, ‘Concealable Zone’, explores how garments are like a second skin for humans, with skin functioning as protection and screening to the world. The collection mainly uses recycled wool from digitally traceable supply chains, dyeing fabrics with natural recycled materials such as wood waste. Designing for low waste, Heyun incorporates laser-cutting with a strip pattern and projection-assisted tailoring, while his bespoke menswear craftsmanship centered on traditional British tailoring encourages longevity. A jacket is designed with a detachable vest, offering versatility in styling.

Q&A with the designer

I am inspired by my university tutor's insights in sustainability and the wasteful state of the industry. Nature Coatings' wood-waste dye sparked a revelation: instead of using fabrics, why not let garments become extensions of nature? Drawing from lizards' colour-shifting skin and beetles' iridescent shells, biological wisdom reveals the ‘freedom of skin’ in a parallel universe. The collection transforms reclaimed wood pigment into customisable ‘eco-skins’ via sustainable printing and dyeing techniques, combined with vine-like bio-deconstructed silhouettes to achieve zero-waste cut, growable garments. This is both a surrender to nature's wisdom and a redefinition of human boundaries.

In this collection I follow sustainability in two main directions: the use of recycled and reclaimed materials, and a design approach using a special zero-waste cut, creating versatile garments.

- Material innovation: Nature Coatings' wood-waste pigment (100% bio-based, made from recycled wood waste) is thermo-molded into the fabricless garment. Liquid dye solidifies as ‘second skin’.
- Zero-waste pattern-cutting: I bond the leftovers and scraps to make a new fabric. Laser-cut strips are draped onto 3D structures, with scraps woven as textural elements.
- Design methodology: During the design process, I think about how to reshape the silhouette of the garment, to deconstruct multiple garments into a single piece with the option to be taken apart and worn again. This will increase the lifespan of the garment.

I believe that sustainability is not only about consumer preference, but also about avoiding waste and creating a better environment for the industry. It is important to use sustainable design methods and visual concepts so that consumers can understand and feel the concept more directly.

Currently I have my own personal sustainable brand PERMU, which I hope to take internationally. I want to make sustainable fashion and our brand culture more accessible to a wider audience. Through my previous experience with Kering's sustainable partnerships, I am building my own methodology for sustainable materials and design. In the future, I will integrate more bio-dyeing techniques (e.g. wood waste/rice dyes) with innovative fabrics (banana fibres, vegetable leathers, etc.) to develop mass-produced molecular sustainable garments. I continue to explore the use of 3D modelling, animation, and other technologies to create virtual wearable fashion. In the future, it will also become part of the brand's sustainability.

Automatic pencils. Pencils are as important to me as my hands. They make me feel safe.

About my brand PERMU, we are trying to break the rules of fashion and give our customers more involvement in their purchases. Participation means that they have the right to customise the details. It's a way for the customer and the designer to exchange ideas, and is our brand's unique way of thinking that allows everyone who loves fashion to have the right to ‘design’. Therefore, the brand name is also derived from the word ‘permutation’. This process adds meaning to each garment, and we focus on craftsmanship research, so that the garment itself has a longer service life.

In addition, PERMU is committed to sustainable technological innovation and virtual fashion. In PERMU's concept, clothing is like a second skin for human beings. We combine biomaterials with the concept of ‘skin’. In 2023 PERMU was invited to join Kering's MIL sustainable design programme, combining Kering's cutting-edge sustainable technologies and innovative fabrics into design development. Innovations include the use of banana fibre materials, recycled wood chip dyeing techniques, rice dyeing techniques, or the use of bio-coating for sculptural liquid garments. PERMU also continues to explore the uses of 3D modelling, animation, and other techniques to create virtual wearable fashion.

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