Dutch Design Week takes place this year from 20 to 28 October. As always, the event focuses on designs of the future. Especially for you, we listed some of the best material highlights of Dutch Design Week 2018. Today, part 1, which focuses on fabrics and fashion. 

Fashion
By-wire.net, a studio dedicated to designing and prototyping innovative textile products and garments, hosts an exhibition that showcases a range of innovative projects from various designers and researchers in the Netherlands and abroad, some experimental, some ready for sale and home use. The range varies from sustainable ways of thinking and designing to integrated technology that changes and improves the way garments behave, feel, and treat your body.

Additionally, as part of this event, MaterialDistrict presents a curated exhibition of carefully selected, innovative materials from 50 material brands. Textile made from pineapple leaves, rope made from human hair, fabric made from wood… During the event, visitors can experience how fancy fashion can be! Click here for more information.

Labeledby will show how new technology like 3D printing can be integrated in textiles and eventually in fashion.

Designer Mirte Veenstra presents a new use for “fish fluff”, a type of plastic, mostly orange or blue, that hangs under fishing nets to protect it. This material breaks off easily, polluting the oceans. Veenstra used the material to create a bikini.

The exhibition Raphia will show the process of making a shoe of mainly natural components. In the footwear industry of today you will find a lot of synthetic materials and mass production. Raphia aims to make a shoe with ingredients nature offers: dried palm leaves from the Raphia taedigera and natural rubber.

Leather
The Materialists, a team of creative whom aim to find new and innovative ways to use materials, tried to find new ways to reuse or recycle industrial production leather leftovers. Eight designers each took a different approach to the matter, from the direct use of leather skins to their reduction into fine powder.

Yksi hosts an exhibition focused on leather, looking for sustainable alternatives. Some of the exhibited designers use waste material from the slaughter industry, like fish leather or cow stomachs. Others created leather-like materials from vegetable material, including palm tree and coffee grounds. Other designers still try to extend the life span of leather or recycle the material.

Textile
Also at Yksi, you can find a collaboration between design studio Bron van Doen and designer Victoria Ledig. They present their project T-Slagerij, in which they turn the most common textile waste in Eindhoven, t-shirts and other cotton-based clothing, into rope. The project aims to inspire both consumers and the textile industry to create quality materials and products from textile waste.

The exhibition Textile Matters by The Swedish School of Textiles explores human needs in relation to textiles and communicate a new philosophy of how needs can be met through textiles.

In the exhibition Circular is the New Black, ReBlend illustrates the perspective and impact of fabric of 100% upcycled postconsumer textiles and postconsumer plastics.

Photos via DDW