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The materials developer formerly known as ELeather has a new name and $18 million in fresh growth funding from some of the world’s fanciest brands.
Now going by Generation Phoenix, the upcycler says its new investors include Coach parent Tapestry, Jaguar Land Rover (via InMotion Ventures) and Dr. Martens, plus lead investor Material Impact and prior investor Hermès.
The 15-year-old firm is based in Peterborough, U.K., and has worked with brands such as Nike and Delta. The upcycler intends to use the new cash to expand “into the luxury fashion and footwear categories,” Gen Phoenix said in a statement. The company claims it has diverted more than 8,000 tons of leather waste from landfills to date.
“Imagine what can happen when waste is no longer wasted,” Gen Phoenix says in an aspirational message on its new website. The upcycler tells TechCrunch that its “feedstock comes directly from tanneries where about 1/3 of a leather hide is typically discarded.” Turning the leather waste into a usable, leather-like product involves shredding and “entangling” it “around a high-performance core using nothing but high pressure water,” the firm said.
Gen Phoenix’s “recycled leather” is not entirely made of recycled materials. A spokesperson for the company tells TechCrunch that its products feature “up to 86% recycled content,” including recycled leather and recycled plastic. Still, the firm’s final product also contains virgin plastic.
Gen Phoenix founder and CEO John Kennedy explaining the company’s leather-like product. Image Credits: Gen Phoenix
Without sharing a specific deadline, a spokesperson for Gen Phoenix said the company aims to “reduce and eliminate virgin materials from their products completely.”
The upcycler is also “commercialising a bio-based coating system and bio-based substitutions for any synthetic materials used in the process,” the spokesperson added. Hopefully, we’ll soon see Gen Phoenix kick virgin materials altogether.
Zooming out: Gen Phoenix’s inclusion of plastics is hardly unusual, even for “sustainable” brands. Fossil fuel–based materials permeate the fashion business. Polyester? Nylon? Elastane? All plastic.
Even the rise of recycled plastic fabrics warrants deep skepticism; the resulting synthetic clothing is rarely recycled, and the microplastics they shed go basically everywhere, including the ocean, mountaintops, the insides of sea critters and even our own bodies. Addressing the industry’s climate and broader environmental toll demands rethinking everything, from how we dye fabrics to killing “fast fashion” altogether.
Gen Phoenix’s upcycled leather woos luxury brand investors by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch
In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, the name of David Byrne’s band was Talking Heads — as the title of their 1982 live album perpetually reminds us. But their overall artistic project arguably had less to do with the head than the body, a proposition memorably underscored in Stop Making Sense, the Jonathan Demme-directed concert film that came out two years later. “Music is very physical and often the body understands it before the head,” Byrne says in a bizarre contemporary self-interview previously featured here on Open Culture. To make that fact visible onstage, “I wanted my head to appear smaller, and the easiest way to do that was to make my body bigger.”
Hence costume designer Gail Blacker’s creation of what Talking Heads fans have long referred to as the “big suit.” Byrne has always been willing discuss its origins, which he traces back to a trip to Japan. There, as he put it to Entertainment Weekly in 2012, he’d “seen a lot of traditional Japanese theater, and I realized that yes, that kind of front-facing outline, a suit, a businessman’s suit, looked like one of those things, a rectangle with just a head on top.”
A friend of his, the fashion designer Jurgen Lehl, said that “everything is bigger on stage.” “He was referring to, I think, gestures and the way you walk and what not,” Byrne told David Letterman in 1984. But he took it literally, thinking, “Well, that solves my costume problem right there.”
Though Byrne only wore the big suit for one number, “Girlfriend Is Better” (from whose lyrics Stop Making Sense takes its title), it became the acclaimed film’s single most iconic element, referenced even in children’s cartoons. New Yorker critic Pauline Kael called it “a perfect psychological fit,” remarking that “when he dances, it isn’t as if he were moving the suit — the suit seems to move him.” The association hasn’t been without its frustrations; he once speculated that his tombstone would be inscribed with the phrase “Here lies David Byrne. Why the big suit?” But now that Stop Making Sense is returning to theaters in a new 4K restoration, nearly 40 years after its first release, he’s accepted that the time has finally come to pick it up from the cleaner’s. Unsurprisingly, it still fits.
Related content:
A Brief History of Talking Heads: How the Band Went from Scrappy CBGB’s Punks to New Wave Superstars
An Introduction to Japanese Kabuki Theatre, Featuring 20th-Century Masters of the Form (1964)
How Jonathan Demme Put Humanity Into His Films: From The Silence of the Lambs to Stop Making Sense
Talking Heads Live in Rome, 1980: The Concert Film You Haven’t Seen
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Imagine setting out to explore a distant barren alien landscape, or somewhere earth bound like the “tortuous” glacial-carved topography of Sarek, Sweden, all accompanied by an electronic score composed by the likes of Carbon Based Lifeforms. Your imagination might very well conjure adventuring accessories similar to the Teenage Engineering’s Field System, a collection of functional bags and accessories equipped for exploration, earthly or otherwise.
The monochromatic collection is characterized most notably but its all-white minimalist theme, one realized in nylon 66 shell fabric complemented by black detailing across closure and zipper lines. The nylon material is both fire retardant and backed with polyurethane leather offering the wearer a 3000mm water repellent rating, affording confidence the contents within remain safe regardless whether you’re climbing up to investigate volcanic activity, plumb the depths of a glacial carved stream… or simply make it back to your car in the rain in this extremely wet winter.
The series is designed to go anywhere, with dry water repellent Japanese mini ripstop nylon accessorized with aluminum alloy hardware, including zips and rings.
Numerous pieces of the Field Series collection, like the Field Medium OP–Z Bag and Field Large OP–1 Bag, are designed specifically to secure Teenage Engineering’s catalog of synths and other musical devices, but are also adaptable for carrying all shapes and sizes of gear.
The Field Backpack includes a field keychain carabiner and even a sitting pad.
Embroidered graphic patches further play up the Interstellar-themed designs.
Beyond bags and carrying cases, the Field Series full range also includes t-shirts and sweatshirts emblazoned with mission/music oriented graphics, water bottles, notebooks, and bottle openers starting from $9 with the entire collection available now at TeenageEngineering.com.
Protect your facial biometric data with knit wear? As absurd as that sounds, designer Rachele Didero, of the Italian startup Cap_able, has patented textiles that do just that. The patterns trick facial-recognition cameras into thinking it's not looking at a person. — Read the rest
Meet this adorable Corgi named Maxine, who absolutely loves posing for photos. She's a natural beauty, and the camera simply loves her. She lives in New York City with her dad, Bryan Reisberg, who also runs her Instagram account, which documents Maxine's fabulous life. — Read the rest
Every other week we’re inviting one of the Design Milk team to share five personal favorites – an opportunity for each of us to reveal the sort of designs we use and appreciate in our own lives from a more personal perspective. Editor-in-Chief Caroline Williamson returns this week for our Take 5 series.
I admit, I’ve long been on the miniature loving train. How can you not fall for teeny tiny objects made with such detail? So when this landed in my inbox, I had to share! British miniature artist Nadia Michaux created the world’s smallest sub – 12x smaller than a regular Subway® Footlong – at just 2.2cm (less than 1 inch). The design is a clay replica of the new Footlong Teriyaki Steak Sub that’s been added to the sandwich chain’s new Japanese-inspired menu. She even nailed the exact colors by mixing clay colors, firing them, and then making necessary adjustments to get it right – a laborious task. Bottom line, it fascinates me.
Louis Vuitton® recently released their 2nd collaboration with Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama and to celebrate they launched several exhibitions to pay homage to her and her iconic dots. Each immersive, and most definitely Instagrammable, exhibition had a different look, including Harrod’s in London donning colorful dots both inside and out and complete with a human-looking Kusama robot, while the Tokyo pop-up was a yellow-dotted dream with a larger-than-life Kusama sculpture in the middle. Wish I could visit them in person!
For some reason, I’ve been really gravitating towards home furnishings in the color lavender lately. If you look around, you’ll notice lavender goods popping up more and I’m loving it… except when it’s paired with other pastels and the palette all of a sudden looks like Easter. Instead, my eyes lean towards more dramatic pairings, like these two tables in lavender and electric red. It’s shocking but delightful!
I’ve had a life-long obsession with Polaroid and I love when they release anything new – cameras or film. And when they launch a collection with one of my favorite musicians of all time, I’m sold. Available in packs of 10, the David Bowie Edition film features 10 unique frame designs that reference his iconic album art and imagery, allowing you to make your own art alongside Bowie’s (even though we have to accept the fact that none us will ever be that cool).
I’ve been intrigued by this piece by Elias Sime, part of a recently opened exhibition titled Tightrope: Behind the Processor. Sime uses recycled electronic components – keyboards, circuits, wires, and various other e-waste – that he braids and layers together to form abstract art, like this massive piece that spans 99-5/8″ x 157-1/2″. From far away, it almost looks like a landscape, like the view looking down while flying on a plane, but closeup, you see all the intricate braiding and weaving of the different components.
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