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At the New Store 2.0, customers are offered a free haircut. Local hairdresser Alberto Fucci will cut at least 3cm of hair. The clippings will be harvested at the end of Milan Design Week by Human Material Loop, and used to make innovative natural human hair yarn as a sustainable material.

Alberto Fucci’s salon, Fucci Hair in Monza, aims to combine beauty, service and environmental responsibility. He sees the New Store experiment as an exciting opportunity to explore a genuinely sustainable process that could transform both hairdressing and the fashion industry.

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. Human Material Loop aims to change the current textile system by making yarn from unwanted human hair clippings. Human hair yarn is natural and versatile and can be used to make all kinds of products.

The Netherlands-based start-up Human Material Loop is a team of scientists, engineers and designers who are challenging the status quo of textile production. Their mission is to transform hair waste into sustainable fibres, disrupting conventional practices and ushering in a new era of circularity in the industry. The team has developed a breakthrough technology that transforms hair waste into high quality fibres suitable for textile production. Privacy is protected as the process renders hair donors’ DNA unidentifiable.

Artist Woo Jin Joo invites New Store customers to join her in creating a collaborative textile piece, embroidered and embellished with human hair. In a series of open workshops, hosted with the help of students from the Ferrari Fashion School, participants will spend time embroidering a collective work, learning the craft of embroidery and thereby challenging the stigma surrounding human hair.

In this project, Woo Jin Joo creates a template for the future use of human hair yarn as a medium for a collective artwork. Participants will be able to add their own embroidery (and even their own hair) to a large textile artwork and craft the final result together. The landscape theme of the artwork highlights our neglected connection with nature. Human hair, so often closely associated with our identity, brings the participants together through and in the artwork.

Woo Jin Joo is a mixed media artist specialising in soft sculpture and textiles and a New Order of Fashion Talent (2021). Originally from Seoul, South Korea, she moved to London in 2014 to study textiles at Central Saint Martins and later the Royal College of Art. Drawing on traditional East Asian folklore, mythology and philosophy, Woo Jin Joo aims to ‘re-enchant’ everyday objects. Exploring the value that people place on objects in our current materialistic and consumerist society, Woo Jin playfully proposes a new way of living, being with and learning from objects – one that is more caring and lasting.