You know how it is — you’ve had a big black bin bag of old clothes in your room just waiting to be donated to a charity shop for months now, but every weekend you completely forget about walking to the nearest donations bin. It’s cold outside and your weekends get busy, look we understand. Well now you can finally get rid of that old black bin bag by donating it to Vetements. No seriously, they want all your old stretched out jumpers and jeans that don’t fit anymore, for a new, environmentally friendly window display at Harrods.
Launching today at the store’s Brompton Road exhibition window, the VETEMENTSxHarrods installation is a celebration of sustainability and a cautionary reminder of what fast fashion costs the environment. “The main purpose of making this installation is to raise awareness and to remind the general public about overproduction,” Vetements CEO Guram Gvasalia said in a statement.
“After the oil-industry, fashion is the second biggest polluting industry in the world and overproduction is one of the biggest environmental problems of today. Over 30% of merchandise produced by fashion brands are never sold and end up in landfills.”
The installation is the first of its kind in the UK, and one of up to 50 pop ups planned globally by Vetements this year. “In a fast world, the fashion tends to be fast too,” says Guram. “We like the idea of slowing down. We like the idea of slow fashion to buy less, buy quality and buy long-term.”
The brand has invited over 4,000 Harrods employees to donate their clothes for the installation, and Guram encourages us all to follow their lead and add our own to the window display, which will run until Friday 2 March.
Vetements explains that all the donations will go towards the NSPCC, but while it’s a step in the right direction to raise awareness of sustainability problems within fashion, it still seems in poor taste to display a mountain of clothes (undoubtedly expensive clothes) in the window of a luxury retailer during the coldest time of the year, when they could be donated, now, not later, to homeless charities… It’s true that the spectacle of our own wastefulness is powerful, but if it’s just that, a spectacle, a stunt, then maybe you should just take your bag full of old clothes down to the Salvation Army bin after all.
