Hennes and Mauritz UK and Ireland launching its inaugural Fashion Recycling Week
Hennes and Mauritz UK and Ireland is set to launch its first Fashion Recycling Week for the end of the summer.
The group will use its H&M garment collection initiative to create window collections in collaboration with the London College of Fashion for the event, Women's Wear Daily (WWD) reports.
The college's Centre for Sustainable Fashion will be involved in the process, which will see unwanted clothes donated by the public transformed into window dressings put on show across the UK in Dublin, London, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Leeds, Brighton, Bristol and Manchester.
"It has been an incredible opportunity for the students to explore sustainability from both a conceptual and industry perspective," Renée Cuoco, manager at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, told WWD. "The students' work showcases creative approaches in encouraging people to value their clothes as the precious resources they are."
The event itself will run August 31 - September 6, and people can donate clothes to the initiative in Covent Garden Piazza in London September 2-5. According to Harper's Bazaar, shoppers will get the opportunity to win £250 (about US$390) to spend in house by guessing how many of the donated items were used to create each installation.
H&M has long been a high street pioneer for sustainable fashion and first launched its garment-collecting initiative, which sees customers get store vouchers for unwanted togs, back in 2013.
However, other brands are catching up -- earlier this summer Topshop gave a new lease of life to off-cuts of material with the launch of a new collection called "Reclaim." This month model and philanthropist Petra Nemcova was also revealed as the ambassador for Level 99's sustainable Autumn/Winter 2015 ‘Forever' denim microcollections, which use fewer environmental resources and put an emphasis on green initiatives. Meanwhile, G-Star Raw continued to grab headlines with its latest Spring/Summer 2015 collection in collaboration with Parley for the Oceans, which saw the duo create a fashion line manufactured using recycled ocean plastic.
