Jean Genius.
Furniture and tableware made from a recycled denim composite by Matteo Fogale and Laetitia de Allegri
London based designers Matteo Fogale and Laetitia de Allegri recently launched, at the London Design Festival, a collection of furniture and homewares that they designed using an ingenious composite of recycled denim, cotton and paper,called Denimite that actually looks like stone but without the weight that stone designs usually carry.
The ISH Collection is Matteo Fogale and Laetitia de Allegri’s first design collaboration. The range features a bench, side tables, shelving, a wall-mounted mirror and a selection of homewares.
The collection also featured another upcycled material called Marblus is made from scraps of white cotton and polyester from discarded clothing, and other fabric offcuts. The mixture of different fabrics gives the mostly white material a blue-grey element which resemble the veins in Carrara marble.
“Recycled materials can often look like a ‘second choice’ and not premium enough,” said De Allegri “We both love the look and feel of stone but we find the weight and fragility a bit limiting in its applications.”
The materials can be worked like wood, and so the entire collection could be fabricated by the designers in-house in their own studio, working with the manufacturer of Marblus and Denimite, Iris Industries, to form and curve slabs of the materials for the first time providing a whole new series of creative options for the use of these innovative recycled materials.
As De Allegri explained in a recent interview with Dezeen “These materials look stunning and are easy to work with, we were able to create pieces that are more accessible and that woould be hard to achieve using real stone. We also like the poetry of something beautiful that mimics a natural material and yet is created from post industrial scrap.”
Organic forms of curves, ovals and circles form a continuos thread throughout the collection which has made wearing your jeans out even more rewarding as their second life, in the talented hands of Matteo Fogale and Laetitia de Allegri will be as exciting as their first.
finding eco 