London’s Most Fashionable Facade

In an effort to recycle clothing and decrease waste fashion, department store Marks & Spencer launched ‘Shwopping’, a project that combines shopping and swapping.

The fashion brand covered a couple of facades of  buildings in hipster town East London with 10,000 pieces of unwanted apparel, resulting in a brilliant, colorful temporary installation that completely changes the face of the buildings and reminds us somehow of an amazing Korean skyscraper with a facade of re-used doors.

The Shwopping project aims to draw attention for the giant amount of clothing that is thrown away every day in the UK. The project states that approximately 10,000 pieces of clothing go to landfills every five (!) minutes. Taking this into account, the facades make a huge statement by visualizing five minutes of fashion waste.

However, the campaign is not only about showing these facts to passers-by. According to My Modern Met, the Shwopping project has placed over 1,200 ‘Shwop Drop’ boxes at M&S stores across the UK for everyday shoppers to place their unwanted clothes into. Here M&S partners up with Oxfam, an international organization that will handle the materials by reselling, re-using or recycling them.

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