For decades, iconic Swiss watch and jewellery producer, Chopard, and the Cannes Film Festival have teamed up to create the esteemed Palme d’Or Trophy and other trophies awarded at the festival’s closing ceremony. Chopard this year collaborated with Danish flooring producer, Ege Carpets and its raw materials supplier, the regenerated yarn manufacturer, Aquafil, to craft stunning and sustainable flooring for the Chopard Red Carpet party at the end of the Cannes Festival.
KBAC Flooring, which is this year celebrating its 50th anniversary, is the sole South African distributor of Ege Carpets which uses Aquafil’s patented Econyl yarns for many of its flooring ranges. Econyl yarns are manufactured from waste products to form a particular type of nylon and the yarns themselves are then after use converted repeatedly into new nylon products.
The Aquafil yarns used by Ege Carpets are sourced from used nylon products that:
* Have reached the end of their product life (for example: used carpeting).
* Have been left in the wild or industrial areas (example: discarded fishing nets left behind in the oceans).
* Are residual products from the manufacturing of other products (example: textile waste products from clothing manufacturing).
Chopard chose LOVE as the theme of this year’s Red Carpet function which, as always, was a memorable party with jaw-dropping jewellery worn by movie stars, celebrities, and VIPs there to see South Korean film director, Bong Joon-ho’s movie, Parasite, being awarded the Palme d’Or Trophy – the first Korean director to win the award.
After this high-profile celebration of international film, the Cannes carpet will be reused before being recycled. The worn part will be regenerated and the rest repurposed, ensuring that the green values of the festival’s flooring continue.
Apart from dressing the floors of the 2019 Cannes soiree hosted by Chopard, Ege Carpets and Aquafil have also collaborated to create stately carpets for the Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards in New York last year and the Green Carpet Fashion Awards in Milan in 2017, 2018 and 2019.
