PHILIPPE STARCK REPLACES LEATHER SKIN WITH APPLE FABRIC

Philippe Starck is a vegetarian French innovative designer, who gives an alternative tendency to furniture fabric. He created a furniture collection for Cassina – a high-end furniture brand, called Apple Ten Lork. This collection has the peculiarity to be upholstered in vegan fabric.

Starck has designed in total 16 pieces for Cassina, including the Volage EX-S sofaredesigned with a thinner arm rest, the Privè collection and the Caprice and Passion chairs. The Italian brand had the desire for new alternative materials embarking with an experimental process. “Cassina’s DNA has always been strongly identified by its drive for research and development,” said the brand. “This is a first move in looking at what alternatives are available.”

Frumat mentioned that the main idea was to drive furniture collection into a more biobased tendency and “to transform biological industrial residuals into a new raw.”

Apple Ten Lork is made from apple cores and skins, biological industrial waste products. The exclusive apple skin materials are manufactured by the Italian eco-friendly company Frumat and can be found in white, orange and black colours. “Those residuals, classified as special waste, otherwise got put in landfill or in some cases are burned,” explained Frumat. Apples are the new leather in vegan furniture collection.

The collection was displaced in Cassina’s Paris showroom, where it has been reconfigured to tell three stories about apples, regarding the material used. The first story was about Adam and Eve with giant reproductions of Albrecht Durer’s 1507 paintings of the characters. The second one was about Newton’s theory of gravity, which was found when an apple fell from a tree and hit his head. And the third one referred the famous portrait of a man with a large green apple floating in front of his face by the famous Belgian surrealist painter Magritte.

Starck’s hope is to urge the consumers to think about the products they purchase and focus on the materials they are made of. “A leather sofa is beautiful and comfortable, but why stop there? We pretend not to hear the question, but we really need to find other solutions,” Philippe Starck mentioned. He wants to respect the vegetal path to mutual respect and looking for animal-free alternatives to leather with many turning to food waste to make their visions a reality. Starck wants to promote a cruelty-free ethos as a vegetarian designer and continue finding other innovative ways, which we will be able to use in the place of leather skin, fur, feathers, etc.