Boussoles à la page Apple power Eco-furniture? It’s the new challenge for 21st-century design. Philippe Starck’s latest collaboration with Cassina is based on apple leather. A new age of environment-friendly materials is dawning. Is there an ecological transition currently underway in design? With the growth of environmental awareness, the choice of mate- rials has become a burning issue. Raw materials have marked the history of manufacturing, from the gold rush and the devel- opment of steel during the Industrial Revolution to the oil industry and the present-day consumer society. French designer Philippe Starck has been pondering these transformations for a long time: “Oil, gasoline and especially plastic are on the way out. Plant-based food should make up 80 percent of our intake. If we become vegetarians, leather will disappear too, like plastic.” The world-renowned designer is today looking at the potential of certain organic materials, like apples. However, he balks at producing “corncob chairs that could be eaten” or using materials requiring land that’s used for growing food. The fruit of temptation The designer has just launched a collection featuring a sofa and chairs for the high-end Italian furniture brand Cassina, produced using an experimental vegan fabric called Apple Ten Lork, made from apple waste. “Apple is a material of the future that has a great variety of uses as a component in sugar and juice, and to chomp,” says Starck. With this in mind, Cassina and Starck partnered with Italian company Frumat, specialists in transforming recyclable residues from organic apples into sustainable, biodegradable materials. This vegan leather made from apple skin, with its unique, soft texture, has a smaller environmental footprint than animal leather and will be a boon to future generations. What could be more natural, then, than for one of the leading lights of “democratic design” to look at the potential of this fruit? “It’s a simple but beautiful object —like Eve, Sir Isaac Newton and William Tell, we believe in the apple, apple power,” smiles Starck. From temptation to gravity, from the origins of humanity to the advancement of knowledge, it is now the turn of Philippe Starck, following on from the Beatles, Steve Jobs and René Magritte, to be inspired by this universal fruit. 94 drayuM reivaX ©