In yesterday's post we looked at a collection based on a recycled idea, so for today let's move instead onto genuinely recycled pieces.
Designer Tobia Zambotti has been trying to employ recycled materials in his creations since he founded his Atelier in Reykjavik, Iceland. In 2020 he launched, for example, a project entitled "The Fan Chair" that consisted in transforming the discarded plastic seats from Laugardalsvöllur football stadium, into fun chairs with brightly coloured steel legs.
The Covid-19 pandemic prompted him to experiment more along these lines with an unusual material that has become an everyday essential item for each of us - the surgical face-mask.
Unfortunately, these masks too often get disposed together with the ordinary waste or end up abandoned in the streets, something that has inspired a few designers to find alternative solutions to deal with them.
Disposable masks available on the market are made with a polypropylene filter and non-woven plastic fabric and, while some designers have been melting and moulding the masks into interior design pieces, Zambotti collected discarded masks from the inhabitants of Perg Valsugana and Trento, sanitised them with ozone and used them as the filling for his "Couch-19", a modular pouf with an irregular shape reminiscent of an iceberg.
In this way he recycled the masks, involved people in waste collection and created a piece of interior design that, being shaped like an iceberg, echoes key issues like climate change and global warming.
Last September Zambotti tried his hand at fashion applying the same principle to his Coat-19. The puffer jacket, designed in collaboration with Helsinki-based Aleksi Saastamoinen, a Fashion Design student at Aalto University, is filled with around 1,500 white and light-blue masks, collected from the streets of Reykjavík (and again disinfected with ozone gas).
Polypropylene, the main material for the mask filter, is also used to produce Poly-fill, the most common acrylic stuffing for cheap down jackets, so using the masks (some of them partly filled with organic cotton wool in order to create puffy shapes) to pad a jacket makes sense.
As the outer layer of the jacket is made with a semi-transparent breathable and waterproof laminate fabric based on bio-sources, the disposed masks can be seen through the garment, their pale blue colour again calling to ice and icebergs, while its shape evoking that of a cloud.
Zambotti has been working on projects that, combining art with architecture, interior design and fashion, help raising awareness about pollution and waste.
In 2019 he created for the Perlan Museum in Reykjavík the "instagrammable" art installation "#WhatCanWeDoNow?" to invite people to consider the damages done by discarded plastic items ending up in the oceans.
The installation, in the floor pool of the museum, was inspired by Silfra, a fissure between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates in Thingvellir National Park famous for its crystal clear water.
It will be interesting to see if Zambotta will take this theme further and even create more fashion/interior design pieces with unusual recycled materials. For the time being, though, as the menswear shows are currently on, it would be intriguing to see "Coat-19" or other creations inspired by face-masks on the runways.
Image credits for this post
Pictures of Coach-19 by Raffaele Merler
Pictures of Coat-19 by Luca Ranghetti
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