FASHION IN FIGURES

Hannes Schoenegger and his friends just wanted a functional, stylish all-rounder bag – one you could take to the gym, on your bike, on a business trip. Back in the mid 2000s, that didn’t seem to exist. So they decided to design it themselves. 

That was the start of Qwstion, a Swiss bag brand founded in 2008 (Schoenegger, now CEO, is Austrian; his co-founders, both industrial designers, are Swiss). The name refers to their ethos of “questioning everything”: the materials, the design, a product’s end of life: “basically all of those norms – we tried to find better answers,” Schoenegger says. 

The first question was how to make a bag without adding to the world’s “mountain” of plastics. They tried cotton: not strong enough, too many environmental problems. Then hemp: a slow, two-year process of figuring out supply chains – only to discover that the knowhow and factories for spinning yarn no longer existed in Europe. They tried linen. They tried bamboo fibre. Then they stumbled upon abacá – a kind of banana plant, grown mostly in the Philippines. 

“We immediately saw the potential, because the fibre itself is quite similar to hemp. It grows without attention. It’s happening in the forests, and there’s no water and no chemicals [needed]. And it grows in Asia, where there’s still a lot of knowhow in spinning and weaving,” says Schoenegger. 

While abacá fibre had long been used to make rope, as well as paper and tea bags, it had never been turned into a fine enough yarn needed to make a bag. Together with a yarn specialist and a weaving partner in Taiwan, Qwstion spent three years figuring that out. The result was Bananatex, described as “the world’s first durable, biodegradable and plastic-free fabric made purely from regeneratively grown abacá banana plants”. Its first bags were shown off in 2018.

Research and development was entirely funded by Qwstion – something no business advisor would have recommended them doing, says Schoenegger. But it felt “like the right thing” to do. He and his co-founders also decided to make their innovation open-source – meaning other companies could request samples and details of the manufacturing process. 

“We didn’t want it as a commercial asset for ourselves, because we wouldn’t cause a lot of positive change if we were only to use it ourselves,” he says. Requests poured in – from fashion, sportswear and footwear companies (and even one cigarette company). 

The interest was hugely encouraging, and in 2020, the co-founders created a small spinout company, also called Bananatex, to develop more fabrics of different weights and weaves. Designers Stella McCartney and Balenciaga and high street brands H&M and Cos are among those who have sold items made with Bananatex.

Rules of the game

The company is supported by Fashion for Good, and it has had investment from a Swiss private investor and Parley for the Oceans, an environmental organisation. But Schoenegger isn’t celebrating yet: sure, it has proven the concept, but Banantex won’t be commercially successful, he says, until 10 or 20 major brands are consistently using its fabric. For that to happen, we need widespread change to the way our economy works.

“The rule of the game is: you have to make profits, and every company has to do that,” he says. Without incentives to use sustainable and circular materials, and requirements to factor in the true environmental cost of the products they sell, alternatives like Bananatex will never be able to compete long term. 

“To be very honest, I doubt that next-gen materials can scale as long as the rules of the game are not changed,” he says.

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And, after the excitement of a few years ago, the sector is now facing “quite a difficult time”, according to the co-founder. “The future materials industry needs a lot of support... We see innovators closing down, and others cancelling their funding rounds, and not being able to scale.” He cites global conflict, inflation and political shifts – as well as unmet expectations among a few larger companies, which may have prompted investor hesitation. Public awareness of alternative materials is still surprisingly low, Schoenegger believes.

But materials like Bananatex have significant potential, he says. Abacá grows only in the Philippines, Costa Rica and Ecuador, but it could be planted in any tropical region, contributing to reforestation alongside other plants. Ultimately, Schoenegger estimates that – with sufficient investment in processing facilities – it could replace up to 5% of cotton in use today. Given the dominance of cotton, that’s no small amount. 

In the meantime, working with nature continues to reveal startling and sometimes advantageous surprises. While developing Bananatex, the team discovered that plants growing in the northeast of the Philippines yielded stronger fibres than those elsewhere – because they had evolved to withstand the more frequent typhoons there. “There’s so much to learn,” Schoenegger says.

Samantha Mureau started a career in the fashion industry in the late 1990s, working in London as a buyer for retailers including high street brand Topshop, before launching her own consultancy. She recalls a time of “very fun fashion”.

Then came the era of ultra-cheap, fast fashion. From 2008, as the financial crisis hit, the industry wasn’t very fun any more: “Everyone was just looking the same, because everything was starting to be dictated by price,” she remembers. Fed up, she left the industry and began a new life in the south of France. Then in 2013, a tower block in Bangladesh that housed factories for low-price western brands collapsed, killing more than 1,100 people. The Rana Plaza building had previously been found to be unsafe but workers had been ordered to continue regardless. Mureau was shocked: “Why are people now dying for our clothes?” she thought. “That’s when, for me, the fashion industry really became very flawed.” 

Shortly afterwards, a documentary called “The True Cost” revealed the social and environmental impacts of the garment industry – and it featured Topshop. “I was like, ‘wow, ok, I’ve got to do something now’,” recalls Mureau.

Rather than creating her own sustainable fashion brand, she decided to focus on a much earlier stage of the process: creating a new kind of material that would interest sustainability-first designers. By this time, she was living in the heart of wine country in Provence, France, where she came across an under-used, yet abundant by-product: grape marc, which is the leftover waste after grapes have been pressed to make wine. 

Mureau started experimenting with grape marc in her kitchen, before piquing the interest of scientists at the University of Lyon. She convinced them to help her create a new material from grape marc that could be used as an alternative to leather or other materials.

To create the new material (which is yet to be named) the grape marc is dried, then ground, and turned into a paste that is spread over a backing, usually made of cotton, polyester or nylon, which gives it strength and durability. The end product is 80% plant-based bio-material, although formulations differ according to the end use – this includes clothing, accessories and interior design items like bar stools.

Although Mureau’s company, Planet of the Grapes, is described as “designed for future circularity”, the material is not biodegradable. But Mureau says a long-term goal is compostability; in the meantime, the company is looking into other ways of limiting its footprint, such as using recycled nylon backing.

Reaching industrial scale

Planet of the Grapes was incorporated in 2021 as a société par actions simplifiée (SAS), the French equivalent to a limited company. It has so far had funding from business accelerator Fashion Revolution, the French public bank BPI, and a local programme supporting circular design in Provence. It has also had pro bono legal support from the law firm Hogan Lovells. 

Mureau sources the grape waste from local organic or bio-dynamic vineyards, where she personally helps with the harvest and gets the waste in exchange for her work, and she prides herself on knowing each of these vignerons by name. As the business grows she plans to buy grape marc from vineyards that would otherwise discard it.

Once she has prepared the grape waste, she sends it to a supplier in Italy that processes it into rolls of material. What started as tiny samples can now be produced at industrial scale – recently achieving a production run of 300m by 1.5m rolls – meaning the product is now ready to be marketed to upmarket fashion and design businesses.

New generation 

Planet of the Grapes is not just about selling a product: as part of several consortia of sustainable material innovators across Europe, it is also advocating for changes to the fashion industry as a whole. 

A major issue is price: creating a whole new material – rather than a simple animal leather alternative, which could be entirely made of plastic – takes time and effort, which is not always understood. “If you’re talking to designers, a lot of times they want the most sustainable product, but they don’t understand the price of that,” Mureau says.

She adds the “extraordinarily cheap prices” of fast-fashion brands such as Shein and Temu mean consumers now have unsustainable expectations. “How can you ever wear a piece of clothing that’s cheaper than your sandwich that you’ve paid for?” asks Mureau. “I think we’ve forgotten the right price of clothes.” 

One solution lies in engaging the new generation, so Mureau teaches sustainable fashion programmes in universities to show young designers that it is possible to create clothes in an environmentally-friendly way. “I love fashion,” she says, “so I wanted to help the next generation coming through to do it differently.” And, as new brands emerge that seek to limit their environmental impact, they will challenge conventional forms of production, she hopes. “New blood coming through in the industry may help,” she says.

From the perspective of Planet of the Grapes, collaboration with individual designers, brands and retailers will be key. Mureau hopes big brands will be open to partnering with innovators like her as they see increasing demand for sustainable products, and as new and improved materials emerge. 

It might come sooner than we think: luxury fashion house Hermès, renowned for its leather work since it began making saddles and harnesses nearly two centuries ago, has already produced a handbag made from mushrooms.