ROTTERDAM.- Welcome to the New Store! Imagine a store that helps to heal our planet, instead of harming it. Our current consumer habits are depleting natural resources, generating waste and causing pollution. What if shopping could benefit people and the environment, instead of damaging them?

Following pop-ups shops in Eindhoven, Milan and Rotterdam, the Nieuwe Instituut – the Dutch national museum and institute for architecture, design and digital culture – is focusing on regenerative fashion with its fourth New Store. New Store Pop-Up 4.0 - Fashion Farming will be open during Paris Design Week from 4 to 13 September 2025, at the Atelier Néerlandais, 22 Avenue Victoria in Paris.

In collaboration with French and Dutch producers and designers, New Store 4.0 is researching and testing a holistic, regenerative approach to fashion. Visitors are invited to actively participate in the small-scale production of a clothing item made from local materials. A central question is whether a product feels more valuable when we know that it is made from natural materials and has a longer lifespan.

Fashion Farming

For the New Store 4.0 project, the Nieuwe Instituut is collaborating with the Dutch Embassy in Paris, as well as several designers and producers. These include Claudy Jongstra and Jesk Jongstra, the founders of the biodynamic textile label LOADS Collection; Ása Bríet Brattaberg, an Icelandic fashion designer based in France; and Collectif Tricolor, a professional association of French sheep farmers, artisans, designers and distributors. All of these individuals and organisations are committed to a regenerative approach to textiles and fashion. This ‘field to fashion’ movement distances itself from industrial mass production by embracing agricultural knowledge and using natural fibres and pigments instead.

New Store 4.0 consists of four stations, each representing a phase in the clothing production cycle: knitting, dyeing, unravelling and reusing the yarn. Visitors will discover that, for a product made from natural materials, the end of life can also be a new beginning.

New Store

New Store is a multi-year research project by the Nieuwe Instituut, developed in collaboration with various designers and partners. Through pop-up stores, we research, test and implement regenerative forms of shopping that contribute positively to people and the planet – from design and production to revenue models and consumption. The New Store pop-ups serve as a testing ground where designers’ ideas and proposals are tried out in the real world. Visitors are not just passive consumers but active contributors and co-creators, whether they are providing raw materials or offering their feedback on how to further develop the New Store.

The first edition of the New Store took place during 2023’s Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven and explored alternative forms of exchange between producers and consumers, showcasing soap made from urine, DIY lighting and insights into food provenance. At Milan Design Week 2024, New Store 2.0 examined new value chains by processing visitors’ hair clippings into textiles and embroidery. The third edition, New Store 3.0, opened in December 2024 as a semi-permanent concept store located in the foyer of the Nieuwe Instituut, selling actual products by various designers.