This week Charlotte Turner ventured to Paris to attend the Premiere Vision textile fair. Here’s what she found there.
This week I visited the world’s leading textile fair, Premiere Vision (PV) in Paris, for the ninth year running, and as always it was a feast for the eyes. Premiere Vision is the ultimate in textile trade fairs, a place to discover upcoming trends and to meet with textile mills from around the world – historically focused on Europe, but now also extending much further afield.
Whilst PV has slowly increased attention on sustainability over the last few years (far more slowly than several other leading textile fairs), the February edition still does not have an area dedicated to sustainability, unlike the September editions, which introduced the SMART creation zone in September 2015. One could argue that we shouldn’t be singling out ‘sustainable’ materials, and that ‘sustainability should be the norm’, but the fact is it isn’t yet. Not having this dedicated area means that searching for more sustainable materials, and the essential accompanying information such as certifications and production background, is still like looking for a needle in a haystack. For those of you looking for a sustainable fabric fix at the beginning of the year, the Future Fabrics Expo in London is therefore the most highly recommended place to find thousands of sustainable materials in one place, most importantly with contextual and technical information to help us understand why they are more sustainable, tracing the supply chain all the way from fibre to finished product.