From Material to Runway

There is a moment in every collection, long before a look reaches the runway, when a designer decides what a material will become. Often, that moment comes late, after the silhouette, the concept and the story are already defined. This September, as Textile Innovation Partner of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Madrid, PYRATEX® explored what happens when that decision moves earlier in the process.

From Material to Runway was a PYRATEX® program that took this question into five different creative contexts, working with Pedro del Hierro, Alex Rivière, Agua by Agua Bendita, Acromatyx and MISS TAKE. The starting point was simple: what happens when material stops being a final selection and becomes part of the creative process? Not simply the fabric that finishes a garment, but a decision that can shape its feel, performance and possibilities.

For Pedro del Hierro, that question connected the runway with an ongoing material research project developed alongside the Saudi Fashion Commission and KAUST. The collection marked the first time the house incorporated PYRATEX® fabric and yarn made with Red Sea seaweed-based fiber into its show looks. Other pieces featured PYRATEX® Circ® lyocell, produced using technology from the United States that transforms textile waste into new fibers. With Nacho Aguayo and Alex Miralles leading the creative direction, the designs extended across womenswear and menswear, in both fabric and tricot. Created specifically for the runway, these materials marked a new chapter in a three-season partnership with the house. Commercially, it currently takes the form of garments made with PYRATEX® Spanish cotton.

Alex Rivière presented at the Palacio de Cibeles, a fitting stage for a brand built around the day-to-day uniform of a modern woman: someone attentive to how she looks, how she feels, and her relationship with materials. Behind this collection is Bea Villarroya, co-founder of the brand, very close to PYRATEX®, who has guided it through a transition from conventional materials toward the materials of the future. It is a formal shift, on paper, but one that plays out as something far more interesting on the runway: pieces designed not for a season, but to endure past it.

Agua by Agua Bendita joined this edition of MBFWMadrid as international guest designers. Founders Catalina Álvarez and Mariana Hinestroza have built their name on bringing Colombian craftsmanship and cultural heritage to an international stage, and for their closing looks, they turned to PYRATEX® lino, a linen cultivated and processed in Europe. It was a quiet but deliberate act of connection: a Colombian creative language meeting a European material, on the occasion of their first runway show in Madrid.

Acromatyx, meanwhile, used the platform to explore new territory, opening its signature dark palette to color for the first time. PYRATEX® materials ran across both womenswear and menswear: PYRATEX® power 3 brought technical performance to the collection, alongside PYRATEX® seacell 15, a heavy interlock built with seaweed-based fiber. The work went further still, through a creative dialogue with designer Franx de Cristal and Xavi García that began months earlier. The team has come to think of them as an extension of the PYRATEX® family. On the runway, Franx's own top offered a first look at PYRATEX® plant 1, one of the brand's major upcoming launches: a fabric made with bamboo lyocell, a perfect, clean interlock, thermoregulating for whatever the moment demands.

And at EGO, MBFWMadrid's platform for emerging talent, MISS TAKE carried the same conversation forward, proof that the earlier a brand starts thinking about material, the more room it has to shape what it becomes. Working with one of PYRATEX®'s youngest team members on fabric selection, MISS TAKE let the materials speak in their most playful, freshest form.

Five brands. Five different starting points: research, fiber origin, tactility, performance, longevity. But underneath all of them sat the same conviction: the decisions behind a garment matter as much as the final image.

Because material does not simply respond to design.

It can change what design becomes.