A small Berlin clothing brand has been gaining popularity for its recent release of designer white shirts. Archivist Studio has been making shirts from discarded linens, taken from luxury hotels. There’s your answer as to what happens to those seriously soft and seriously expensive linens that get thrown out for even the slightest of defects, from stains, holes, and rips. Well, not all of it, but at least some of it that gets used by this clothing brand, rather than it being thrown out.
Eugenie Haitsma, a Dutch designer, did his research and was able to find out that much high-quality bedding gets thrown out and goes to waste due to small defects. And when we say high-quality, we mean high-quality Egyptian cotton that’s really in great condition if you were to ask the average Joe. For this very reason, that’s why the designer decided to come up with unique ways to recycle the material for a good and useful purpose. While it didn’t take her long to understand that this type of cotton was ideal for shirts, it did take her some time to take action.
Only last summer did Haitsma, the designer meet up with a fellow designer to discuss plans. Her fellow designer, Johannes Offerhaus, also Dutch, was looking for something that would serve a purpose, which is exactly where Haitsma’s idea of using materials from luxury hotels came in right in time. The more they looked into the idea, the more it actually made sense to them, and the hotels were also overjoyed to get rid of their linens free of charge and to know that they would be used elsewhere. It really was a win-win situation, with the designers also, of course, thrilled to have free materials to work with. The linens are cleaned, and then sent to a factory in Romania, where they are turned into designer white shirts with a hefty price tag of anywhere from $150-172. They aren’t cheap – but they are surely unique!