The great design challenge: Hawkins\Brown

LIFE radically refashions a tired typology within our high streets, reversing consumption and waste production by making them sustainable hubs of ethical fashion enterprise.

LIFE is a temple of repair, recycling, recreation, mindful consumption, education and skills exchange. It supports and encourages long-term consumer engagement by stopping transactional and unsustainable retail behaviours and creates a platform for fashion brands to invest in community projects by hosting a closed-loop skills academy.

LIFE will bring new meaning to the phrase ‘are you being served?’ as it restructures the question towards a post-consumer society.

Fitting will take on a whole new meaning - matching new uses to old spaces

It will be an umbrella organisation that offers space to like-minded NGOs, universities, charities and community groups. It will be a fashion hub not unlike Kensington Market, which was founded in the 1960s – home to independent small-scale designer-makers.

LIFE will deploy design strategies and tactics normally associated with repairing garments to patch, embroider, embellish, adjust, let out, darn, re-tailor and upcycle the fabric of the building and to regear its spaces.

Fitting will take on a whole new meaning – matching new uses to old spaces rather than tailoring them to suit. Escalators will be repurposed as goods transportation systems, foregrounding staircases as a much healthier way to navigate the building. A dye garden will be cultivated on the roof among drying laundry and textiles.

Material laboratories will take advantage of the department store’s generous floor loadings and service zones where researchers investigate new forms of textile conservation and material science. The logistics, operations and buildings systems will be redeployed to accommodate the trade and flow of raw and recycled material.