Chinese car manufacturer Nio has launched Blue Sky Lab, its own sustainable fashion brand, which has been shortlisted for a 2023 Dezeen Award.
Blue Sky Lab creates garments and accessories using materials left over from the car manufacturing process including seat belts, airbags and other car-grade fabrics to demonstrate how waste can be “creatively repurposed”.
Nio claims the label is “the world’s first sustainable fashion brand launched by an automotive company and brought to mass production”.
Blue Sky Lab made its debut in 2021 at the Shanghai Auto Show and has since reused nearly 55,000 metres of waste fabric.
These car-grade surplus materials can help to create new high-performance products, according to the brand.
“Blue Sky Lab enjoys an innate advantage by adopting auto-grade materials in its fashion products as these materials outperform their consumer-grade counterparts to a large extent,” the brand said.
“We think more about improving our products rather than blindly catering to the external environment. For example, the recycled materials from the airbags are light and durable with high strength, a perfect fit for lightweight fashion items.”
The materials are simply sterilised and repurposed into a variety of products in line with the brand’s minimal futuristic aesthetic.
“Regarding environmental protection, most visual communication tends to adopt nature and green elements,” the company said.
“However, rather than being confined by such a monotonous style, we have chosen to find inspirations from our DNA and business areas including innovative technologies, manufacturing and industrialization, and lifestyle in carrying out product design.”
“Blue Sky Lab has joined with global design talent including Nio’s designers, Japanese architect Shuhei Aoyama, French leather goods designer Vincent du SARTEL, Finnish designer Rolf Ekroth, NIO user designers and designers from Parsons School of Design, Li-Ning and Allbirds,” the brand added.
The brand told Dezeen it has mass-produced over a hundred different fashion items since its inception alongside tables, stools and lighting fixtures.
The brand also partnered with an independent product testing and certification agency to calculate the carbon footprint of its bestselling products.
“Compared with their counterparts made of traditional raw materials, their footprint per unit is 18 to 58 per cent less,” the brand said.
Blue Sky Lab has been shortlisted in the sustainable consumer design category of this year’s Dezeen Awards.
Here, the brand is competing against the world’s “first refillable” edge styler and soap-in-a-can brand Kankan.