Desserto is a highly sustainable plant-based vegan-leather made from cactus.
This is the first time a Mexican company has won the MCFW 2020 Sustainability Awards for its contribution to fashion sustainability: Desserto, the world’s first cactus vegan leather.
With the purpose of creating an alternative to animal leather, Adrián López Velarde and Marte Cázarez, both hailing from Mexico, developed vegan leather made with nopal (a cactus), which they successfully showcased last October 2019 in Milan, Italy.
The aim is to offer cruelty free, sustainable alternative, without any toxic chemicals, phthalates and PVC. The result is a beautiful product with great softness at touch while offering a diverse performance for a wide variety of applications and complying with the most rigorous quality and environmental standards. It’s partially biodegradable and has the technical specifications required by the fashion, leather goods, furniture and even automotive industries.
After two years of research and development, the creators could finally finish marketable cactus leather in July 2019. Its trade name is Desserto, and it has competitive features compared to animal or synthetic leather, like sustainability, resistance, being fully customizable and breathable.
At Raw Assembly, Australia’s first sustainable fabric sourcing event for the fashion industry, the most buzz was around Desserto, “They literally launched it a couple of weeks ago,” says founder Thea Speechley, “so it’s pretty cool to have it here in Australia first.” Kit Willow was beside herself.
The top 10 sustainable facts of Desserto’s organic cactus feedstock:
Systaino