Yarn from human hair: Nieuwe Instituut presents 2nd New Store pop-up at Milan Design Week
Nieuwe Instituut presents the second edition of the New Store during Milan Design Week 2024 from 16 to 21 April. In this experimental pop-up shop, which made its debut at Dutch Design Week 2023 in Eindhoven, Nieuwe Instituut tests alternative forms of exchange that can help our planet to sustain life, rather than hurt it. At the New Store, visitors are not just passive customers; they contribute the raw material – in this case their hair, time and ideas – to collectively test a new value economy and become co-creators of two end-products: sustainable yarn and a human hair textile work. This is the second step in a multi-year research project that will lead to a permanent New Store with regenerative products at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam.
27 March 2024
Human consumption often depletes natural resources, produces waste and causes pollution. Imagine a store where shopping helps the environment, not hurts it. In the experimental pop-up shop New Store, the Nieuwe Instituut tests alternative forms of exchange. By using undervalued (waste) products and transparent transactions, we create new value chains that make a positive contribution to people and the planet. Visitors are not passive customers, but just as much the raw material and co-creator of the end products.
The New Store is an example of the Nieuwe Instituut’s testing ground approach, in which it uses its strengths in research and critical enquiry not only to propose new ideas, but also to actively implement and test them. The first edition of New Store took place during Dutch Design Week 2023 in Eindhoven, where three selected designers from an open call experimented with soap made from urine, do-it-yourself lighting and far-reaching insight into the journey a fish took before it ended up on your plate.
The long-term goal is to create a regenerative store, from its products to the physical store itself. New Store 2.0 is a step towards that direction.
New Store 2.0
The second edition of the New Store during Milan Design Week 2024 presents a fresh look at how a future retail store could work. In the pop-up store in socio-cultural center Stecca 3 in Milan's Isola Design District, visitors and designers together investigate a new, circular value chain for a waste product that we normally attach little value to: human hair. In Europe, 72 million kilos of human hair are discarded every year. Yet hair shares the same keratin protein fibre as wool, and can be processed in a similar way.
The New Store 2.0 presents two new value economies; at the first one, customers can receive a free haircut from hairdresser Alberto Fucci. Their hair clippings are harvested for the Dutch start-up Human Material Loop, which uses a groundbreaking technique to make sustainable yarn. Whether or not they have their hair cut, customers can also join the other option, and help South Korean mixed media artist Woo Jin Joo and other visitors in creating a human hair textile piece that explores the potential of this material and seeks to overcome any stigma or feelings of disgust.
Not only products, but the design of retail stores themselves can be enormously wasteful. New Store 2.0 sets out to create a store that aims to be as sustainable as the products we exchange and test. By collaborating with spatial and graphic designer practices that research and use different forms of circular and sustainable design: graphic designer Cengiz Mengüç, circular interior designers OS_Studio & Jeroen Wand and sustainable, modular furniture from Falsework, with support from local carpenters BRIChECO.
Aric Chen, General and Artistic Ditector of the Nieuwe Instituut, says: “New Store is one of our ‘testing ground’ initiatives for putting ideas into practice - for bringing proposals out into the real world, and seeing how they work. For us, as a cultural institution, it’s about not just discussing and presenting designers’ ideas for confronting our many social and ecological challenges—but also enacting them.”
More information
New Store 2.0 can be visited for free during Milan Design Week from April 16 to 21, 2024 at Stecca 3.0, Via Gaetano de Castillia 26, Isola Design District, Milan. It is a collaboration with Temporiuso, made possible by regenerative partner New Order of Fashion.
The New Store is a multi-year research project in collaboration with the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) and research-led cultural consultancy The Seeking State. The aim is that eventually a permanent New Store will open in the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam.
For more info, go to the page of the New Store.
Press enquiries
We encourage press to visit the New Store at Stecca 3.0 (Via Gaetano de Castillia 26, Isola Design District, Milan) during Milan Design Week. Pre-registration via r.vanessel@nieuweinstituut.nl is appreciated, but not necessary.
In addition, the Nieuwe Instituut is organizing a private breakfast session with artistic and general director Aric Chen on Wednesday, April 17 between 9:00 AM and 10:00 AM. During this relaxed start to the day, we would like to tell you about our projects and plans. To register, please contact r.vanessel@nieuweinstituut.nl.
Images: can be downloaded here. For questions and requests, please contact Robin van Essel, Press Offier, +31(0)6-3803 9218, r.vanessel@nieuweinstituut.nl.