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Asked what the future of retail looks like, Australian fashion designer Kit Willow imagined a store that could showcase a product’s entire life cycle from start to finish, waste and labour and all.
“[Property developer] Beulah came to me and said, ‘Kit, what is the future of fashion retail? We are using this beautiful building in Melbourne as a testing ground for future ideas’,” says Willow, whose fashion brand Kitx is one of the most prominent in Australia. With a chuckle, she recalls saying she didn’t know the answer to that question. “I said, ‘What I do know is we have an enormous waste issue in fashion globally. Why don’t we set up a lab where the entire process, from waste to finished good, is transparent — waste fashion arriving, being washed, cutting it open, making it, machining it, shooting it on a model. And that’s what the Future From Waste Lab is. We’ve made it happen.”