The archive · PR & Stunts · Marketing decision · 2024
Atacama Fashion Week holds a runway in the world's largest clothing dump — El Ojo golds
Chilean NGO Desierto Vestido and Artplan turned the Atacama's 39,000-ton illegal clothing dump into a real fashion show, with outfits made from the trash.
Desierto Vestido
What it had to solve
Desierto Vestido, a Chilean NGO, wanted the world to see the clothing dumped illegally in the Atacama desert around Alto Hospicio — at least 39,000 of the roughly 60,000 tonnes of secondhand clothes that arrive in Chile each year. Reports and protests had not moved anyone.
How it works
Atacama Fashion Week was not a protest poster or a report — it was a real fashion show held on a mountain of trash. In Alto Hospicio, Chile, mountains of discarded clothing from the US, Europe and Asia had piled up illegally in the Atacama desert, one of the largest textile dumps in the world.
NGO Desierto Vestido joined Artplan and Fashion Revolution Brazil to hold the first fashion week inside the landfill in April 2024. Stylist Maya Ramos designed a collection for eight Chilean models entirely from the dumped garments, a photographer produced an editorial, and the show streamed online as 'Atacama Fashion Week'.
The act reframed a distant environmental crisis as spectacle: instead of asking people to imagine the damage, it let them watch models walk among the evidence. The campaign drew worldwide coverage and swept the Latin American awards circuit, taking three PR golds, a Sustainable gold, an Outdoor gold and a Brand Experience gold at El Ojo 2024.
Why it lands
- Holding the show inside the dump made the scale of the waste physically visible, not just quoted.
- Real designers and models gave the landfill the legitimacy of a fashion week, which media could cover.
- Streaming and a photo editorial turned a one-day event into shareable, lasting content.
- An NGO cause got the production polish of a brand campaign, which earned festival attention.
What it did
El Ojo 2024 gave the campaign three PR golds plus golds in Sustainable, Outdoor and Brand Experience & Activation; Meio & Mensagem named it one of the year's ten best marketing actions.
What you can take
To make an invisible problem visible, stage the story exactly where it happens: a runway inside the landfill turned an abstract waste crisis into a spectacle the press and juries could not ignore.
Since then
Atacama Fashion Week became the reference point for the textile-waste crisis in Latin America. In 2025 Artplan returned with 'Re-commerce Atacama' for Desierto Vestido and VTEX — an El Ojo PR bronze — to resell salvaged garments online, keeping the campaign franchise alive.
Sources
- El Ojo PR 2024 – finalistas y ganadores
- Atacama Fashion Week – Desierto Vestido
- Atacama Fashion Week 2024: desfile de moda en uno de los vertederos de ropa más grandes del mundo
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