For us at Kurinji, the environment is important. That is why we put upcycling at the basis of our products.
In 1994 a German mechanical engineer, Reiner Pilz, coined the two opposite terms downcycling and upcycling. By the former he defined simple recycling, the reuse of a material to create a lower quality product: still better than throwing it away, but not good enough. By upcycling, on the other hand, he meant a reuse of that material to make a better product.
We want to preserve the environment, eliminate waste, creatively reuse everything that would otherwise risk being thrown away, decrease pollution and the impact of human activity on nature.
That is why our foundation is upcycling. New use, quality use. It is not easy to put into practice, it is a challenge to our ability to think, to ideate, to imagine. If we take a fabric in large production, we can do anything with it; if we take a dead stock, a limited amount of fabric that would be in danger of going unused, thrown away, we have to bend our imagination to see what it could become, within the limits imposed on us.
But that is not enough. We do more. Those fabrics that are no longer enough for a new production line we salvage, we insert them as decorative elements within our patterns, giving them new life and turning them into a design element. A pocket, a color that appears unexpectedly on the sleeve of a suit when you fold the arm, the back of the collar of a shirt or jacket.