First-year students Amsterdam Fashion Academy create upcycled designs with Uniqlo

The upcycled designs created by four groups of first-year students from Amsterdam Fashion Academy (AFA) in collaboration with Uniqlo, are currently on display at the flagship store of Uniqlo Netherlands at Rokin in Amsterdam.

In June, Amsterdam Fashion Academy and Uniqlo unveiled the winning designs of their upcycling project, which the AFA students worked on for three months.

The four winning designs which were inspired by Uniqlo’s LifeWear philosophy, were selected by the Uniqlo Netherlands team after ‘a highly competitive selection process,’ a release reads.

FashionUnited asked the participating students to describe how they experienced working on the project.

“A challenging success, ” designer Lola Kaczmarek said. She continued: “Looking back, this journey has taught us, has taught me, so much. We agreed, we disagreed, one minute we were working efficiently and starting over the next…”

“But in the end, although it was sometimes a bumpy ride, it seems that great minds who manage to work around not thinking alike can achieve great things. A true challenging success,” she concluded.

Enny Schmidt added on her part: “Lightness has taken on an entirely new meaning for me through this project with Uniqlo. Our approach aimed to capture the essence of springlike lightness in our design.

“However, it was the shared journey with Dana and Giulio that truly allowed me to ease into the lightness that creativity entails. It’s a feeling that’s hard to describe with words, but I believe it enabled our final design to truly blossom,” the first-year AFA student said.

The winning designs will be on display until July 11 at the Uniqlo Rokin flagship store in Amsterdam, first in the store front display and later in July on the shop floor.