Sustainability is a keyword in many different fields nowadays, including architecture, fashion and design. In some cases fashion designers turned to interior designers who previously developed recycled materials, to give a sustainable twist to their collections.
Kris Van Assche called for example Jorge Penadés to collaborate on his A/W 21 collection for Berluti.
The Madrid-based designer created for the menswear company a line of small accessories – including necklaces, keyrings and charms. All of them were made with colorful leather offcuts from Berluti's ready-to-wear collections. 
Unveiled in April, the accessories were just launched in the newly relocated Milan flagship store on via Montenapoleone together with three exclusive furniture pieces to celebrate the current Salone del Mobile (cancelled last year and postponed from April to September 2021 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Salone will be on till 10th September).
The accessories could be considered as resized portable and wearable versions of Penadés' 2015 previous project entitled "Structural Skin" and revolving around recycled leather.
A few years ago Penadés started studying different materials and realised that the quality of leather depends on the part of the animal the hide comes from, with some experts claiming that just the 13% of a hide is top quality and up to the 43% is considered good quality. This means that companies producing leather goods produce a large amount of discarded materials, leftovers and offcuts.
These apparently worthless bits and pieces from leather factories became Penadés core material: he reduced the leather into strips, mixed them with a glue produced from animal bones that acted as a binder and transferred the mixture into iron moulds. Once it is set and solidified, the top layer is shaved, revealing the marble-like patterns created by the strips.
Penadés developed his first pieces of furniture – that he finished using shellac, a natural resin – with this material in 2015. While experimenting, he realised the material would be useful in different industries, from fashion (to make small accessories as in Berluti's case, but also shoe soles) to interior design (the material is ideal for furniture pieces, but also for flooring and tiles).
Besides, it may also be employed in the automotive sector as the material becomes as solid as wood (seen from a distance Berluti's cube necklace and solid rectangle keychain look as if they were made of wood or maybe of glass paste…), while retaining the flexibility of leather. The Berluti project is not the first collaborative one with a fashion house as Penadés already worked in previous years with Hermès, using its leather leftovers.
Jorge Penadés is currently also the protagonist of another event at Milan's Fuorisalone, the performance "Looks Like Magic!" (as part of the 5VIE series of events in via Cesare Correnti 14, until 10th September).
In this case Penadés has experimented with what he calls "textile-clay", a sort of a clay-like material made out textile waste. So far he has tried to produce different objects with it, but visitors in Milan will not just be able to look at the final objects, they will also discover the different stages of the making process as the designer has recreated in the exhibition spaces a sort of experimental laboratory of sustainable ideas.
