The Single Gloves Of Laugavegur

You’ve probably wondered about the various lonely gloves that decorate a fence on Laugavegur. Single Gloves is a project that started in 2013, collecting single and lost gloves from all over the city. People can put them there to pair up. After three years of developing, we thought it was time to track down the person who started it all and made it into the street art it is today.

Estelle Divorne — originally from Switzerland — has been living in Iceland since 2012. Biking everywhere she goes, she gets the chance to see a lot. “The first thing I noticed were all these gloves lying around so I thought, why not do something with them.” And thus, the Single Gloves project was born. People started putting gloves there and collecting others, it started to take on a life on its own and that’s exactly what she wanted. “It belongs to the streets of Reykjavík now.”

On the Internet people started looking up what it was. The project came to life because of the people who started sharing pictures and coming up with answers themselves. Some answers  are, well, not as correct as others–some people thought it was a place to speed date. Even though she never emphasized it being a place to do so, she’d be happy to see people coming together because of this.

The main reason behind this project is to recycle. She tries to recover everything she can and that’s also the message she wants this project to convey. “I know I’m not going to change anything about the waste in general this way but I want to spread the idea of recycling.”

When asked if she likes how the project has evolved, she answers modestly that she’d just be happy if it keeps leading its own life as a part of Reykjavik’s street art and encourages people to “keep collecting gloves”.

Check out more of her work concerning recycling here.