Textifood: When Food Waste becomes Clothing

At the centre of the Milan 2015 Universal Exhibition, the Textifood exhibition presents textile creations made from fibres that are mostly edible. Could it be a glimpse of the industry's future?

The subject is of vital importance: “Feed the planet, energy for life”. Since there are more and more of us on the planet, the Milan 2015 Universal Exhibition (01 May to 30 October 2015) decided to place the food issue at the centre of the debate. With this in mind, Pavillon France together with Lille Europe to put on an extremely successful exhibition called Textifood.

“In line with Futurotextiles exhibitions, this event presents fibres extracted from plant and animal species, of which part is edible with the other part used for textile creation”, explains an official for lille3000, a cultural programme promoted by the city of Lille. The objective of the exhibition: to show the range of possible synergies between the systems of food and textile production.

Fibres from every Continent

To promote these new fibres, lille3000 called upon designers and stylists who are excited by smart and sustainable growth to imagine designs incorporating fibers which have been harvested from crop residues. On the menu: orange, lemon, pineapple, banana, coconut, nettles, algae, mushroom, coffee, rice, soya, maize, beet, wine, beer, fish and shellfish...

The designers and artists selected for the initiative include Coralie Marabelle, Christine Phung, Design Percept, L’Herbe Rouge , A+Z design and Egide Paris, who integrated the fruit of the research by textile companies based on plant chemistry and treatment of the biomass.

Others, such as Eric Raisina Em Riem, Ditta Sandico, Kristian Von Forselles, Dognin and Nina Gautier, have worked on natural fibres known for centuries which had almost been forgotten. Lastly, some of them, in their laboratories, such as Donna Franklin & Gary Cass, Jonas Edvard, ou Orange Fiber, created innovative and visionary materials. Among the discoveries were the dresses of Em Riem (Kh) and Ditta Sandico (Ph) made from banana silk fibre. It is a fabric used in Japan, Nepal and the Philippines whose silkiness also has great resistance and is flexible and waterproof.

Christine Phung and Morgane Baroghel-Crucq (FR) worked together to create an organic dress made of metal thread, flax yarns and fish collagen fibre, developed especially for the occasion by the company Umorfil. L’Herbe Rouge (FR) took up the challenge of creating clothing made entirely from coffee, weaved from a thread called S.Café® and dyed in a final bath of coffee grounds which added shimmering nuances and softened its touch.

Geneviève Levivier and the studio A+Z Design (Be) experimented with new non-woven materials with eggshell base and Polylactic Acid [PLA] from maize and beet derived from research by the Belgian Textile Research Centre, Centexbel. The research firm Orange Fiber, based in Catania in Sicily, revolves around the development of a textile using orange peel at the Milan Polytechnic laboratory.

This truly is a sector for the future, as each year more than 700,000 tons of industrial waste is produced in Italy alone through the conversion of citrus in the agro-food industry. It is a thought-provoking exhibition that allows its the public to view their waste from a different perspective. It is a long way from the pollutant culture of cotton or synthetic fabrics which is giving way to new textiles that are incredibly diversified.

Originally written by Céline Vautard