The design icon’s new range of outdoor furniture
The acclaimed Italian furniture designer’s new range features a unique recyclable yarn that’s woven into ‘melange colours’. Anna Lenti, the brand’s managing director, explains the process
What was the inspiration behind your new Twiggy outdoor fabric and the furniture pieces made from it? Our desire was to further enhance the performance of outdoor pieces, to make them suitable for places like hotels, beach clubs and public spaces in general, where the intensive use of furniture demands a high degree of practicality without giving up comfort and aesthetic. Our existing outdoor collection, based on our exclusive yarn named Rope, offers excellent performances in exteriors, provided careful maintenance is carried out regularly. The new yarn, Twiggy, and the deriving material, Diade, are waterproof, dry very fast, do not absorb dust or soil and thus require much simpler maintenance and care. Why is the Twiggy technology so exciting? It has allowed us to introduce a fully recyclable yarn that is high-performing even in harsh environments, and to make it available in hundreds of hues all very resistant to the sun’s rays. It has allowed us to produce cords, braids, fabrics, and the Diade material for our collections, which guarantee superior qualities but not at the detriment of aesthetics.
How important is sustainable design to your company?
We have been innovating in this way since the inception of the company. Our activity is based on the respect for nature and the human being. We are conscious that we are mere hosts on the Earth. It does not belong to us, and if we do not seriously face the environmental problem, we will leave no future to the next generations. We have moved over the years in that direction — reducing material waste, using recycled materials when available, developing recyclable materials, reducing the number of components and simplifying their assembly.
Explain the significance of this collection It shows our commitment to sustainability, our desire to meet the requirements of markets and sectors with functional, high-performing and durable products that are well-designed.
How did you come up with the palette? Twiggy is not a simple thread. It is composed of several threads and we mixed colours to create a palette of melange hues that produce variable shimmering effects once Twiggy is woven or braided. We made sure the range would coordinate with the colours of all the fabrics and materials in our collections, to create a coherence between the past and the future. It is what we always do, and it is probably why our collections always appear so up to date.
What do you love most about the collection? We have been able to develop a sustainable, top-performing material that is pleasant to the touch and to the eye, featuring the very textural appearance that has been the hallmark of our collections. Furthermore, we have enhanced our design process towards a sustainable design model by creating products that are mono-material (or composed of a limited number of materials), which makes them easy to disassemble. dedece.com or @dedece