Anya Hindmarch closed all of her London stores for three days and filled them with 90,000 plastic bottles, making a bold statement about the impact of plastic pollution. The designer’s team sourced the bottles from local communities.
Sustainability and the environment have been the highlight throughout the London Fashion Week. A global activist movement, Extinction Rebellion (XR), held a protest at the latest London Fashion Week. They blocked the roads as they demanded the biannual fashion event to be canceled due to the harmful impact that the clothing industry has on the planet.
XR aims to use nonviolent civil disobedience to force the government to avoid biodiversity loss, tipping points in the climate system, and social and ecological collapse.
However, accessories designer Hindmarch agrees with the XR, but she chose to raise awareness of the environmental impact differently: highlighting the profusion of plastic pollution. The designer specifically decided to use 90,000 bottles to fill her shops because it’s the equivalent number of bottles that are purchased every six seconds around the world.
To harmonize with her eco-conscious presentation, Hindmarch also launched a new collection called “I Am A Plastic Bag.” The bags were manufactured using a material sourced from used plastic bottles and coated with recycled plastic windshields. Hindmarch searched for vegan or recycled leather for the trim but ended up making it with leather.
The designer clarifies:
Whilst the initial plan was to use vegan or recycled leather for the trim, after much research and expert advice, it was concluded that responsibly-sourced leather was the best material as the alternatives contained unacceptably high-levels of polyurethane. The leather used is a by-product of the meat industry and is sourced from a tannery in Northern Italy close to where the bag is made.
The “I Am A Plastic Bag” collection follows the “I’m NOT a Plastic Bag” series, which was released in 2007 in partnership with an advertising agency called Antidote and with social change movement Shift. Hindmarch said that since the ‘2007 I’m NOT a plastic bag project’, those words couldn’t leave her head, like a song repeatedly playing in your head that you can’t get out.
Hindmarch explained:
The problem of single-use plastic and landfill is far from over, however, the mission has shifted from simply being about the ‘awareness’ of using less plastic, to being more about the ‘circularity’ of the use of materials in the supply chain. That’s why I have spent the last two years developing I AM A Plastic Bag.
Starting in February 2020, a limited number of products from the “I Am A Plastic Bag” collection, with a price range from $770 to $900, will be available till April, when the full range will be released.
