The wool Exchange, BRITISH WOOL X Central Saint Martins

Industrially playful pop-up installation for the ‘Wool Exchange’ with British Wool & BA Knit and Fashion CSM

We were commissioned by British Wool to design and fabricate a pop-up installation to house 30 looks by leading british designers displayed as part of a panel discussion on the sustainability and beauty of British Wool.

The Wool Exchange was designed in collaboration with British Wool, Berni Yates and Craig Lawrence from BA Knit and Fashion at CSM. The event and exhibition aimed to celebrate British Wool and the farmers, manufacturers and designers that have been championing its beauty and sustainability within their designs for hundreds of years, and how collectively different industries and stakeholders can continue to push its useability. 

The brief was to present the garments with impact and think beyond the standard hanger-and-rail display combination, bringing the event to life and positioning British Wool as a contemporary material. Studio TIP was chosen because of our industrial aesthetic and see-no-waste attitude, aligning perfectly with the values of British Wool and CSM.

Temporary installations can often be highly wasteful in their nature but we took a reverse design approach using overlooked materials from construction sites and manufacturing side-streams to instead champion their creative value and reuse potentials.

We sourced a material palette from deconstruction sites, manufacturers and re-use initiatives then playfully assembled compositions that would later host garments from the likes of Vivienne Westwood, Charles Jeffrey LOVERBOY, Margaret Howell and Harris Tweed. Staying true to our nature everything was designed through ‘playing’ and with the intention to be disassembled at the end of the event with bolts, ratchet straps, cable ties, wire and clips. Upon takedown every single element was donated to the CSM materials swap shop or taken back to our studio and had the possibility to be endlessly re-used.


Thank you to our collaborators on this project who provided materials:

KPH, Material Store (Resolve Collective), Renné materials, Tiflex Flooring, Toureen Group, The Crown Estate, The Reach, Westway Climbing, Neilcott Construction and British Wool. Thank you to Zhero Logistics for transport.