Recycling beauty

When Luisa Cevese started working in the R&D department of a silk textile manufacturer in Italy, she noticed that a lot of fabric was wasted as unusable scraps.

Milanese designer Luisa Cevese shows there’s life in old waste

When Luisa Cevese started working in the R&D department of a silk textile manufacturer in Italy, she noticed that a lot of fabric was wasted as unusable scraps. It was too beautiful to be just discarded and that’s when she came up with the idea of using these scraps to create whole products. She founded her company Luisa Cevese Riedizioni, which uses different kinds of textile waste and encased them in plastic or resin to create a new eco-friendly fabric, which was then used to create bags and other accessories.

The Milanese designer is in India to oversee the launch of her ‘fossilised textiles’ range in India. The collection features a whole range of eco-friendly bags, purses and stationery products. “I’ve used a lot of Indian fabrics in my designs,” Cevese says, displaying a small purse, made of obviously Indian silk, encased in resin, “Quite often, you find fabric which is worn out and too old to be used, but it’s too recent to be classified as an ‘antique’. That’s the kind of material that I look for – because it is still beautiful and it just has to be used the right way.”

Cevese has used some unusual materials in her production line. “Here is a bag made using actual fishing nets from Sicily,” she says, flipping through a catalogue of Riedizioni designs, “and here is a line made of African fabric, which we get from a Parisian tailor, who creates clothes exclusively for the African market in England and Holland.” Time and again, products with interesting histories behind them surface. “We have a line made of newspaper scraps. One of my friends who lived in Delhi told me about a group of street children who were making a living by creating bags out of paper scraps. I said yes, and the first shipment which arrived contained not just the bags, but also little scraps of paper.”

The products might be eco-friendly, but they’re definitely in the high price range. “Our market is very niche,” Cevese says, “that is partly because of the price. But also, most of our products are bought by people who already have everything. They’ve bought every bag on the market – leather, cloth, suede. Now they’re looking for something different and that is what we give them. Of course, we do sell to the wider public through museum shops, but mostly, our market is niche.”

Cevese sees great potential in the Indian market, as opposed to its greatest rival, the Chinese market. “In Italy, we see China as this production market, making things for western markets and trying to be as western as possible. India is still rooted in its traditions and consumers here have greater appreciation for products like mine.”