Responsible Yarns and Knitwear at SPINEXPO

The 5th session of SPINEXPO, a trade fair dedicated to promoting innovation in the yarn, fibre and knitwear industry, will present a preview of its collections and colour ranges for the Spring/Summer 2020 season from 16-17 January.

SPINEXPO is the go-to venue for all fibre and textile yarn users and buyers of flat knit garments. The event brings together a selection of the industry’s key textile groups and is aimed at knitters, weavers, lingerie manufacturers and ready-to-wear brands and fashion houses with their own knitwear departments.

“A yarn can become so much more in the hands of a strong and enthusiastic research and development team,” the organisers report. “Looking at the trends for the Spring/Summer 2020 season, we present Modern Vintage, or how recycling becomes upcycling, or how recycled materials are better than new ones.”

Using all the products in stock to reinvent them, mixing yarns in stock and new yarns, inventing new garments from previous collections by giving them a new interpretation, refreshing them with surface treatments, inlays and embroidery – in short, using existing products to give them a new life at a reduced cost – leads to a more rewarding and cost-effective solution than 80% off sales or destroying unsold items.

“Our stylists will present a number of creations that are simple, attractive and cost-effective. A third presentation will illustrate the Spring/Summer 2020 season’s key theme IN BETWEEN.”

“To illustrate this trend, we have chosen the spinner Shilead, which has been applying the concept Reduce, Reuse, Recycle since the 1960s and has recently added Replace to this four-part concept.”

“The company’s products have been Oeko-Tex Standard 100, OCS, GOTS and GRS-certified since 2009.

Reduce

Major investments have helped to considerably reduce the contamination of the company’s dyeing process. Shilead reuses 60% of the volume of its waste water, controls APEO, which is toxic and hard to break down, and conforms to ZDHC (Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals) programme.

Recycle

With organic cotton, recycled fibres and cationic modifications, recycled yarns have an important place in Shilead’s collections and are used to create innovative and varied fantasy yarns. And it has taken things a step further with the arrival of a recycled nylon thread that gives these products a much more modern twist.

Replace

New this season, Shilead is introducing Ecovero, Sorona and graphene fibres, which give the yarns a functionality whilst protecting the environment. Sorona is a corn-derived fibre that provides an alternative to oil, whilst at the same time protecting the textile’s appearance.

Graphene provides heat insulation against infrared rays and has multiple properties: it is antibacterial, anti-ultraviolet and antistatic.

Reuse

The spinner controls its stocks and redevelops them into a wide variety of new products, whilst monitoring the season’s trends, enabling rapid delivery of products that are already tested, completely refreshed and stably priced.

These and other innovative sustainable developments will be highlighted at the next month’s SPINEXPO trade fair in Paris, France.

www.spinexpo.com