Italian industrial designer Diego Vencato has created a collection of wooden textiles (+ slideshow).
The fabrics, called Wooden Mesh, were designed to transform wood into a soft and flexible material that behaves more like cloth, Diego Vencato says.
Thin pieces of wood were cut into small shapes and applied evenly onto a felt backing.
The patterns include neatly ordered triangles, sharply angled parallelograms and smooth-edged shapes that resemble a giraffe's markings.
We've previously featured a carpet made from wood veneer offcuts and a T-shirt made from triangles of wood, while Icelandic fashion designer Sruli Recht presented garments made of wood in the menswear collection he launched earlier this year.
Other textiles we've featured include an installation of hundreds of fabric ribbons and fabrics printed with bleach to spell out coded messages – see all textiles.
Here's some more information from the designer:
Wooden Mesh by Diego Vencato
A high-tech patented process to create the "wooden mesh", a compound which combines a rigid material to a flexible support. The wood goes through a metamorphosis process to become a new kind of skin.
Transforming wood, making it possible that it not only could be flexible or soft, but it could also behave exactly like a cloth, was the idea behind the project.
To turn wood into fabric we had to break the continuity of its surface, which we obtained by dividing it into pieces. Wood, organised as in polygons, was then coupled with the fabric, which acts as a support and a binder at the same time.
This is how we created "Wooden Mesh", a compound – realised through a high-tech patented process – that combines a rigid material (parent material) to a flexible support (secondary material).
The goal was to move beyond the hand-crafted production to create an industrial product that had a more suitable cost for the market. This was possible thanks to the major contribution of Sintesi Laser and Alberto Martinuzzo, founder of Albeflex and "father" of the soft wood. Now the two-dimensional surface of a piece of wood has been completely transformed to become as smooth and soft as fabric.
Stop copying! http://www.elisastrozyk.de/seite/woodtex/woodente…
Wouldn’t make a comfortable pair of trousers!
Basically a copy of Elisa Stroyzk.
A redesign of a concept. It’s not a copy.
Similar to the material Foldtex.
Arh, putting chopped-up wood together as a new material (that’s bendable) is not exactly a new concept. Look at plywood as an example. Triangles are also not a new concept. I’m getting a little bored with the “copy-alarm” here in Dezeen comments.
It is with art, design and architecture that the basics are already there. Can we start differing between inspired, redesigning and copying anytime soon?
“Inspired” and “redesign” are euphemisms for “copy”.
Copy means not altering, just making more (copious from latin means “rich” or “plentifull”). Copies are the same (e.g. twins and clones), redesigns have either mutations (e.g. blue eyes, no tail, no fur) or mixed genes (such as children) and inspirations have adapted similarites (e.g. environment, children try to imitate their surroundings to mirror themselves in a specific context). In my opinion we can discuss whether or not this is a copy, but the three words do not mean the same – not in this context.
Glueing bits of laser-cut wood veneer to a piece of cloth can’t really be considered inventing a new material or making wood bendable. Using the same technique you can make steel, glass, stone, ceramics and diamonds bendable or cloth-like. This has been known for millennia as sequined or beaded cloth.