H&M Debuts Collection Made With Vegan Grape Leather

Retailer H&M recently unveiled its Conscious Collection which, this year, features Vegea—a vegan leather made in Italy from waste byproducts of the wine industry. The new leather is featured on shoes and handbags and will be available at stores worldwide on March 26. In 2017, the clothing brand gave Vegea an H&M Global Change Award for its innovative “wine leather” product. H&M is also using a new dye made from coffee grounds collected from its offices in China and aims to move toward 100-percent recycled and sustainable materials by 2030. “Going forward, we need to be using more bio-based materials and use more waste in our collections,” Pascal Brun, H&M Sustainability Manager, told Vogue. “In 2020 and beyond, we need to take the concept of circularity to another level. It isn’t just about materials, though, it’s about how we can design clothes to last longer and to be eventually recycled, and how can we involve our customers to have more sustainable behavior. It’s a holistic approach.” Last year, H&M featured other innovative vegan materials in its Conscious Exclusive collection, including Piñatex (leather made from pineapples) and Orange Fiber (silk made from oranges).