Some of the most creative work in fashion is happening right now, in the hands of young designers who see possibilities everywhere. They grow their own silk, turn seaweed and algae into cloth, cut entire collections from a single square, and build beauty from materials most people overlook.
They're also the inaugural recipients of The Next Thread Initiative Scholarships, part of the CFDA x Bezos Earth Fund The Next Thread Initiative – a $6.25 million grant to the CFDA Foundation working to advance innovation and education in sustainable fashion.
This year marks the first scholarship cycle: $500,000 awarded by CFDA Foundation to twelve undergraduate and graduate students pursuing sustainable fashion design, with award sizes customized to close each student’s tuition gap in full, plus stipends to cover design materials and studio work.
Students from across the United States presented their work to a committee including Bezos Earth Fund Vice Chair Lauren Sánchez Bezos, CFDA President & CEO Steven Kolb, and fashion designers Joseph Altuzarra, Stacey Bendet, Tommy Hilfiger, Grace Ling, Sami Miró and Tracy Reese. Scholarship recipients were selected based on material innovation and environmental impact, design and construction strategy, and creativity and design vision. The twelve recipients represent students from eight schools across the country, with standout portfolios that ranged from turning invasive weeds and unused inventory into new fabrics, to creating nature based-dyes and zero-waste pattern systems, to developing biodegradable materials designed to return safely to the earth.
Meet the student designers shaping what comes next and learn more about the awards at CFDA.com
BFA Fashion Design · Marist University
Caterina builds zero-waste tailoring from the immigrant experience, using anatomical construction as a language for resilience and memory. Spine moulage and rib-cage pleating take shape from rectangular cuts, and every offcut becomes a pocket, a cuff, a detail. Custom prints drawn from her own writing turn each garment into a personal record.
BFA Fashion Design · Academy of Art University
Catrielle turns community-sourced quilts, reclaimed denim, and repurposed drop cloths into sculptural garments, treating quilt-making as a living archive of labor and memory. She uses every material in full, dyeing donated cotton and linen with indigo, turmeric, and rainwater, then setting the color by sun. Before a single stitch, she prototypes silhouettes in Clo3D to plan her cuts, reaching up to 98% fabric efficiency on zero-waste patterns. For Catrielle, the craft and its history are the source of innovation.
MFA Fashion Design and Society · Parsons School of Design
Cayman examines American identity through the archetypes of Ivy style: the button-down, the cardigan, the pencil skirt. Working entirely in deadstock and scrap, the collection runs on a "pattern-negative" system that reattaches the shapes left behind after cutting, so the full width of every rectangle finds a use. The result feels at once familiar and reinvented.
MFA Textiles · Parsons School of Design
Freda works in biodegradable materials — hand-reeled silk, wool, and gelatin-based biomaterials — that break back down in natural cycles. Drawing on her own experience of surgery and recovery, she treats skin as a site of rupture and repair, building membrane structures that sag, tear, and register pressure. Her work shows how fashion's most structural surfaces can be grown.
BA, Material Science, Fashion Design & Business · New York University
Grace raises her own silk. In her studio she hand-tends silkworm cocoons, dyes with indigo, iron oxide, and chlorophyll, and knits fully-fashioned so the collection is zero-waste from the first stitch. Built around inheritance and her Chinese-American family, the work draws on a community supply chain of local farms and donated deadstock.
MFA Fashion Design & Society · Parsons School of Design
Hera comes from a lineage of Southern sharecroppers, and for her, sustainability is a tradition passed down for generations. She grows her own indigo and hand dyes with it, cultivates lace from tree bark, and builds in upcycled denim and copper mesh chosen for durability. It is a Black making tradition, carried into fashion's future.
BS Fashion Design · Drexel University
Kaitlyn turns invasive plant species — Japanese knotweed, garlic mustard, starry stonewort algae — into textiles, drawing out fibers, natural dyes, and algae-based filament with low-tech methods that need no lab equipment. Growing up in Hawai'i doing invasive algae cleanups, she learned to see removed material as a local resource, and her collection puts it to work in convertible garments that adapt across seasons and climates. Her guiding belief is that anything brought into the world should give back more than it takes.
MFA Fashion Design · Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT)
Nell builds a collection out of decay, burying and composting natural fabrics in FIT's dye garden and letting rust, weathering, and time stand in for conventional dyeing and finishing. Every color comes from natural process: iron oxidation, decomposition, and hand-painted biodegradable latex that stands in for snakeskin with no animal harvesting or tanning chemicals. She starts from what has been weathered and lets what returns carry the record of its exposure, so that decay itself becomes the condition for the design.
MFA Fashion Collection and Communication · Pratt Institute
Parul works with drawn threadwork and traditional Indian textiles, tracing the exchange between Indian and European craft. Her collection uses only three natural, locally sourced fabrics to minimize offcuts, reworks pulled threads and selvage into embellishment, and relies on homemade starch and gesso. Removable zippers let each garment decompose safely at the end of its life.
BFA Fashion Design · California College of the Arts
"I want to work with plastic without working with plastic." September grows their materials instead of buying them, developing gelatin, agar, and seaweed bioplastics into cloth with honeycomb, holographic, and stained-glass textures. Gelatin doubles as a bio-based glue and seaming tape, and their closures are designed to be repaired or replaced, a fully biodegradable material system built largely from waste.
MFA Fashion Design · Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT)
Zion pulls from architecture, anime, and video games to build an avant-garde denim system he frames like game patch notes. Working in raw Japanese selvedge denim, he uses a technique he calls planar flux, patterning a full look from a single square so it stays low waste from the first cut. The entire process is built digitally — patternmaking, prototyping, and 4K rendering — before anything is sewn.
MFA Textiles · Parsons School of Design
Zoe listens to water. She watches how rivers move, translates that movement into line drawings, and embroiders them onto felted and knitted textiles made from natural and secondhand fibers. Her emerging work with algae-based bioplastics adds embellishment, structure, and a durable sheen to wool.