Cupro : a sustainable fiber
What is Cupro ?
At DIANE Paris, we are committed to sourcing sustainable fabrics without compromising on style. Cupro is one of our favorite fabrics because it is a vegan and responsible alternative to silk. With a soft touch and a fluid hand, it is perfect for making our draped dresses, our tied tops, our ruffled dresses, in short all the pieces for which we would have traditionally thought of silk!
So why is cupro a better alternative?
Cupro, although it is still little used today in the textile industry, has many properties that make it a responsible alternative to more common fibers:
It is a fiber obtained from the recycling of wastes from the cotton industry
Its production is done in a closed circuit, all the wastes are fully recycled
unlike silk, it does not require animal exploitation (although there are "cruelty-free" silks, but they are currently marginal in the textile industry)
unlike polyester, it is not derived from petroleum derivatives
it is 100% biodégradable
it is thermo-regulating, antiperspirant and hypoallergenic
How is cupro produced ?
Cupro is an artificial, and not synthetic, fiber obtained by the chemical treatment of cellulose extracted from cotton linter, a waste from the cotton industry.
Although it undergoes a chemical process, Cupro remains a material of plant origin composed only of cellulose, reworked to give a thread. The cotton linter from which the Cupro fibers are extracted is actually waste from the textile industry: it is the short fibers that surround the seeds of the plant, and which are usually considered unusable, and therefore discarded.
Producing cotton being a process that requires a lot of water and resources, the benefit of using it to the maximum and recycling waste is quite obvious.
To obtain the ready-to-weave yarn, the extracted cellulose is soaked in a solution of cuprammonium (an ammoniacal solution of copper oxide), and if this may seem counter-intuitive for a material considered to be sustainable, it is necessary to take into account the fact that production is done in a closed circuit. The water and chemicals used in the production of Cupro are therefore constantly reused until they are completely gone.
