Designer Patrick McDowell has partnered with Tencel to launch its first sustainable made-to-order offering. The made-to-order collection launch follows Patrick McDowell’s spring 2023 fashion show.
The spring line features three sustainable materials: Tencel Luxe, Tencel lyocell, and recycled wool from textile company Manteco.
Young designers like McDowell and Amsterdam-based Lisi Herrebrugh and Rushemy Botter of the brand Botter, which showed at Paris Fashion Week, focus on bringing sustainable materials to Gen Z by focusing on noughties design, modern tailoring, and mid-range luxury pricing.
Tencel Luxe is a new botanical alternative to silk with the properties that make silk so valuable. It is an innovative lyocell filament derived from wood pulp sourced from sustainably managed forests and exclusively produced in Austria with an awarded sustainable closed-loop process. It has been conceived with a deep respect for nature and the pursuit of exceptional quality.
McDowell said that Tencel material could be scaled more easily than off-cuts and material deadstock.
Seventy-five percent of his spring 2023 line, which debuted on Monday. was made of out Tencel lyocell. Tencel launched 30 years ago, whereas Tencel Luxe launched in 2017; it is a higher-end, longer filament version of the original fabric and better suited for high-end design.
Harold Weghorst, Tencel’s global VP of marketing and branding, said, “We see a significant shift toward sustainability throughout the industry, but specifically in the luxury and premium industry that is driven by a younger generation, who are more concerned about the future of our planet. That is also our target audience for Tencel Lux.
So we are looking for designers who speak to that audience and who believe in sustainability themselves, like McDowell.
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