Meet Qwstion, the Swiss company making premium handbags from banana plants

When it comes to the fashion industry’s issue of sustainability, the problem isn’t that it's churning out clothing in unsustainable quantities - it’s also using synthetic fibres like polyester that cause enormous harm to the surroundings. Fortunately, trailblazing brands all over the world are developing brand-new materials to reduce the damage.

Swiss brand Qwstion is going to be one of these. The Zurich-founded label, founded in 2008, would make premium bags and gadgets using Bananatex, its proprietary fabric made from plant life of the banana tree.

The fabric is well known locally as ‘Banana Hemp’ or ‘Abacá’ in the Philippines where it is grown before being processed right into a viable option to synthetic fabric. The replacement of such fibres is currently an enormous talking point surrounding attempts to completely clean up the fashion industry.

Once touted just as a miracle fibre because of its cheap, light and durable houses, polyester has become the dominant material found in garment production today. But it has come under scrutiny recently as a result of release of microfibres. Regarding to a 2017 article from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), an estimated 35 percent of most microplastics in the ocean originated from the laundering of artificial textiles like polyester, which were woven deeply into the heart of the fast-fashion sector.

FashionUnited spoke to Qwstion co-founder and innovative director Christian Kaegi about the creation of Bananatex, the decision to make the fabric wide open source, and the price tag on sustainable fashion.

First we used natural cotton - nonorganic, standard natural cotton. That was simply the only thing we're able to find when we began that had the overall performance we were seeking for when found in bags. Then your next big step was to create our very own GOTS-certified organic and natural cotton canvas. We still make usage of it today in a few of our collections - it comes from Turkey and is prepared in Hong Kong.

Before coming to cotton we as well did a bunch of tests with other materials like bamboo, hemp and linen - to mention just a few. They were all organic fibres with an inherent strength, which was something we actually need for our bags, but we didn't reach a reasonable point when developing those materials.

It was just difficult to discover a steady way to obtain the fibres. We considered applying nettle, for example, that was historically quite prevalent for strong rucksacks and was utilized by the Swiss army in around the 1920s-30s. In the past there was a steady resource being harvested and produced, but that's no more the case.

With hemp we did have the ability to discover a source in Europe. We had a goal to get the entire supply chain contained in an extremely close geographic location around Switzerland but we had problems there as well. We found a steady way to obtain hemp in Belgium, then your spinning would be done in Northern Italy and lastly the weaving on specially altered looms in Switzerland. But that complete process meant a complete trucking distance of around 4,000 kilometres within Europe.

We realised doing it that way had a bigger environmental footprint in the end compared to what we could achieve in Asia which ultimately was decisive inside our decision to explore the spot where we eventually found the banana fibre.

We were doing a large amount of research of hemp with the Asian companions we were already working with on the organic natural cotton plus they mentioned they knew a spinning mill that had merely been setting up that was using banana fibre. They were very early on in their experimentation level so we emerged in at a really good time and may develop something together with them. That resulted in a three-year period of experimentation until we realized the textile we were actually happy with, Bananatex.

I would mention now Bananatex is just about taking over from our other materials. As soon as we knew Bananatex was accomplishing in the way we wished to and hit all the sustainability criteria, we decided to implement it immediately across all of the range. If you see what we stated in the last 2 yrs then it has been around 80 percent Bananatex. We expect almost all our items to be using Bananatex in the next three years.

Bananatex is just about 27 dollars per metre - so that it is massively more expensive if you do a comparison of it to polyesters, nylons or Cordura which are in the number of around 3-4 us dollars per metre. Our organic cotton is around 9 us dollars per metre, to place that in perspective.

Using something this expensive provides forced us to totally reconsider everything about the design of our bags. The first release of Bananatex was a minimal collection and there it had been really about minimizing the amount of parts to pay what we could when it comes to higher prices so we could, in the end, reach a cost point that was even now demographic. Our rates have gone slightly up but I would say it's eventually the price of sustainability.

If you go through the Martindale abrasion check [a unit for quantifying the abrasion resistance of textiles] in that case we are at a level of around 30,000 which comes even close to thinner variations of Cordura. Heavyweight versions of Cordura might review 100,000. But I think it is crucial to really consider the ‘appropriateness’ of supplies. That is a standards where performance plastic-based materials 're going immensely considerably - you could take a tonne in your backpack, but who must do that? When designing we really looked at appropriateness and idea about how much performance does anyone really need for the intended goal. That was our focus.