The upcycled collection
The upcycled collection is a bold celebration of creativity, collaboration, and circular fashion. Created by local designers and makers, this collection transforms non-swappable clothes - items too damaged, outdated, or unloved for The Swapshop - into one-of-a-kind garments with new value and new stories. Every look reflects the unique vision of its maker and the potential of upcycling to challenge the throwaway mindset. Scroll through to meet the creatives and explore their pieces. Find the upcycled collection in the separate section in our stores at the Oude Binnenweg in Rotterdam and the Haarlemmerdijk in Amsterdam.
Rotterdam
Nandi Dmyszewicz
From an early age, Nandi was surrounded by craftwork. Her grandmother crafted clothing with such care that pieces remain cherished decades later. Sewing instilled in her a deep appreciation for garments as carriers of love and heritage. After studying Product Design at Willem de Kooning Academy, she felt drawn away from creating more new products and toward repurposing existing materials instead. Later, at The Swapshop, she discovered the joy of extending clothing’s life and the stories they hold. Today, through The Swapshop Lab, she channels this passion into upcycling, proving that sustainability is built on daily choices that spark meaningful change.
Kirsten van der Ham
Kirsten is a graphic textile designer with a passion for art, fashion, and sustainability. Although she’s vegetarian, she embraced her last name and founded VAN DER HAM STUDIO. In her work, she explores the intersection of graphic prints, textiles, and streetwear through experimental and creative designs. For this project, she works with upcycled clothing from The Swapshop, giving existing garments a new life through prints, alterations, and new context. Her style is inspired by streetwear and the freedom of mixed media. She sees clothing as a canvas, a way to express identity, movement, and creativity without compromising sustainability.
Tiziana Silva Neves
Studio Tizi is a sustainable fashion studio based in Rotterdam. Each piece is individually designed and remade by hand by Tiziana Silva Neves, using carefully sourced secondhand materials, including un-swappable clothing from The Swapshop, which she transforms into something new. She creates unique, story-rich garments that carry her own signature style. With her brand she promotes a more conscious and circular approach to fashion. Through her work, she invites others to value craftsmanship, creativity, and more mindful ways of consuming clothing.
Gamze Ozturk
Gamze Ozturk works with damaged and discarded clothing to rethink both material and meaning. She rarely begins with a fixed image or final design in mind. Instead, her process starts by dismantling garments, separating, collars, pockets, cuffs, and linings until the clothing loses its original function and becomes a collection of forms, textures, and memories. Through cutting, rearranging, and reconstructing, she searches for unexpected relationships between these fragments. She is interested in how decisions emerge through touch, repetition, and the history already carried within the fabric. By giving waste materials a new life, she designs clothes that feel both familiar and transformed, shaped as much by the material’s past as her own intervention.
Cajsa Mahlgård
Cajsa Mahlgård is a Swedish fashion design student whose work explores reconstruction and circular design. For this project, she uses pairs of jeans that have become unsellable, because they were damaged, discarded, or simply overlooked. Through deconstruction and transformation, the denim is rebuilt into adjustable corset-style tops, giving each garment a renewed purpose and extending the life of existing materials. By reimagining what would otherwise become waste, her work highlights the creative potential of circular fashion and conscious making.
Amsterdam
Matilde Ceccato
Matilde has recently graduated from Fashion Design at AMFI, with fashion playing a central role in her life from an early age. Through her studies and her experience working in The Swapshop, she developed a deep understanding of the fashion industry's environmental impact and the importance of designing with sustainability in mind. She is committed to creating thoughtfully, rather than producing from scratch and adding to the world's existing surplus of clothing.
Katharina Spitz
Katharina is a conceptual designer with a background in couture dressmaking. Her practice balances craft, research, and art, exploring new perspectives on pressing social issues through a feminist, material-oriented lens. She investigates themes such as inequality, alienation, and identity in poetic, tactile ways. Her experimental material development emphasizes mindful resource use, valuing imperfection, absence, and transformation.
Nandi Dmyszewicz
From an early age, Nandi was surrounded by making. Her mother crafted clothing with such care that pieces remain cherished decades later. Sewing as a child instilled in her a deep appreciation for garments as carriers of love and heritage. At Willem de Kooning Academy, she resisted using new materials, instead re-purposing discarded denim and exploring natural dyeing. Later, at The Swapshop, she discovered the joy of extending clothing's life and the stories they hold. Today she channels this passion into upcycling.
Andrea van der Kuil
An award-winning production designer, textile artist, writer and maker. Her work explores vulnerability, domestic craft, slow labour, gender performativity, and storytelling, with sustainability at its core. Through embroidery, embellishment, and fabric manipulation, she transforms textiles and garments into new forms. For her, upcycling is both a creative practice and responsibility - an act of care, resistance and renewal.
Georgia Carns
Georgia has a background in Graphic Design and Business, with a strong passion for sustainability and fashion. She has always loved creating with her hands, attending workshops to hone skills in DIY, repair, upcycling, and jewelry making. Her love for upcycling spans clothing, furniture, and accessories, always finding beauty in what others discard - one person's trash is Georgia's treasure. Since joining The Swapshop, Georgia has been at the forefront of addressing textile waste, helping setting up The Swapshop Lab.
Anna Clazina Galema
What began as a therapeutic hobby has grown into a passion for material, creativity, and inspiration. Ans is a one-woman show who creates and upcycles through crocheting, felting, and sewing. She hopes to share this passion, teaching others to reuse items or find peace in their own creative hobbies. During the pandemic and a long recovery, she immersed herself in fiber arts. Her brand continues to grow, inspiring others along the way.
