If you have been wondering why the Red Cross shop on Reykjavik’s Laugavegur shopping street is looking a bit different, read on…
At The Red Cross on Laugavegur 12, there is an event underway in collaboration with The Reykjavik Fashion Festival and Worn By Worship.
Each week in the countdown to the fashion festival, a designer will style the window display at the Red Cross with great fashion items that have been donated.
Worn By Worship is a new online venture that connects fashion designers with charities and the organisation is planning more small events around the city in the future to demonstrate how Icelandic fashion design can come together with local charities for good causes.
“This is our first event for the Reykjavik Fashion Festival, and we hope that it will help change some perceptions of second hand clothing and bring new customers to the local Red Cross charity store,” explains Worn By Worship’s Richard Foley.
Thelma Design hosts the first designer’s week and has beautifully decorated the windows with antique hats. The hats were all hand picked by her from the Red Cross store and some she even donated herself. The idea behind her display was to convert the old and tired phrase “Bag Lady” into a more stylish “Hat Lady”.
Thelma Design was launched in 2005, specialising in one-off embroidered headpieces. Her desire as a designer is to revive the hat as a demure, decorative symbol of beauty. Inspired by the grace and elegance that come with headpieces from ‘olden eras’, the designer wants to revive this style and attitude with a modern twist.
Stefan Svan Adalheidarson for the Reykjavik Fashion Festival, who encouraged the designers to get involved, gave each designer complete freedom to express an essence of their style on a charity shop budget. At first it was difficult to think of what exactly the designers were going to exhibit, until the quirky idea of having a mini charity fashion rundown showing the best buys of the Red Cross.
The event is called Komdu og skodadu i kistuna mina (Take a look in my chest)
Thelma Design 18.02.10 – 24.02.10
Nikita 25.02.10 – 03.02.10
Birna 04.03.10 – 10.03.10
E- Label 11.03.10 – 17.03.10
Mundi 18.03.10 – 24.03.10
Illustration: www.thelma-design.com / Ingvar Hogni Ragnarsson
This is a noble endeavor during this hard times not only within Iceland but also helps in places where the Red Cross have out reach programs. We maybe in a melt down but there are still lots of things we can do to be more usefull. More power to the undertaking, strenght to the members and we will also try to give what we can share.