Activation: New Store 2.0
With the New Store 2.0, presented at Milan Design Week 2024, Nieuwe Instituut imagines a store where shopping helps the environment instead of harming it. In this second iteration of the experimental pop-up shop, located at socio-cultural centre Stecca 3 from 16 to 21 April, Nieuwe Instituut is testing alternative forms of exchange.
Can a store help our planet to sustain life, instead of just consuming natural resources? Can shopping ever contribute to the regeneration of the living world? Nieuwe Instituut’s New Store 2.0 investigates a new value economy, another step towards such a regenerative scenario.
In this fresh look at how a store of the future might work, the New Store not only proposes, but enacts a new value system involving the harvesting of human hair. Customers are invited for a free haircut, with their trimmings then turned into yarns that can be used for a range of textile products.
In demonstrating this system, the store brings together local hairdresser Alberto Fucci, sustainable yarn producer Human Material Loop, NOOF talent Woo Jin Joo – and, of course you, the customer. In the New Store, customers are not just passive consumers – they are the source of raw materials and the co-creators of the final product.
We Need Your Hair campaign image. Graphic design: Cengiz Mengüç
In the New Store, customers receive a free haircut from hairdresser Alberto Fucci. The hair clippings are harvested for Human Material Loop, which uses them to make sustainable yarn. The yarn is processed in a way that makes DNA unidentifiable, thus guaranteeing privacy. Of course, in a future real-life version of this scenario, customers would pay for their haircut and hairdressers would be paid for this raw material.
Whether or not they have their hair cut, customers can also join mixed media artist Woo Jin Joo and other visitors in creating a piece made from human hair that explores the potential of this material. The act of embroidering with hair actively questions our relationship with (human) waste, seeks to overcome any stigma or feelings of disgust, while offering an engaging way to explore the ideas around the New Store.
By working together in this ‘value network’, where undervalued waste products from one product or service become raw materials for others, and consumers become makers, the New Store explores a new value system that can benefit people and the planet.
Woo Jin Joo - A Long Long Time Ago
Nieuwe Instituut previously showed their regenerative store concept during Dutch Design Week 2023 at the Residency for the People in Eindhoven. New Store 1.0 tested forms of consumption and invited visitors to try regenerative products. Three selected designers tested product ideas that rethink conventional consumer products by using alternative materials, production processes, working conditions, sales methods and eventual reuse.
New Order of Fashion consulted Nieuwe Instituut on regenerative fashion designers to include in the project. NOOF 2021 talent Woo Jin Joo was selected and will travel to Milan to co-create with the visitors of the Store. Come and visit!