This lavish trend collection from LANXESS, one of the world’s leading suppliers of leather chemicals, enables customers to see and feel for themselves what the new trends are like. What’s more: ‘We also provide the recipes and products needed to manufacture the new leathers and colours and, if necessary, offer technical service at the customers’ own plants,’ says Bianca Verstegen, Global Product Manager in the Leather business unit. ‘This gives our customers a genuine competitive advantage, as it helps them decide on their next leather collections at a very early stage.’
Close cooperation with a well-known Italian designer and stylist who is also under contract to the major Italian fashion houses means that tanners can find out at an early stage what kind of surface touch, appearance and overall impression are going to be in fashion. This knowledge of tomorrow’s trends underscores once again LANXESS’ technical and creative competence in the field of fashionable leather.

The three visions for the Spring/Summer 2010 season sound like a homage to nature:
• Simplicity + Naturalness = Chic
Exquisite, refined and yet casual elegance for a timeless style. Materials and colours combine to surround you with an air of fresh modernity. Be yourself. Be straightforward. Be natural – and free.

• Born Biological
A close affinity with one’s origins. A return to an ancient, traditional culture in which colours, materials and scents awaken in us the desire to shout from the rooftops: ‘This is leather!’ I am at one with nature.
• New Hippie
I won’t allow myself to be tied down, I am free to choose and to interpret. My natural instinct for colours and materials creates a link to the old hippie culture. I want to experience it in a new way, a modern way – my way.
‘Anything goes and everything is possible,’ says Giuseppe Latini, head of the Competence Centre Italian Innovation. ‘We can incorporate more or less any colour or structure – even special embossings such as motifs from the hippie era.’
The colours for the coming fashion trends are borrowed from nature and range from pastel to full shades; from delicate pink and bright red (New Hippie), through earthy/rusty browns (Born Biological) to a natural white and sky blue, also in combination with a modern, metallic silvery gloss (Simplicity + Naturalness = Chic).
Patterns, structures and colours of days gone by form a symbiosis with the world of tomorrow. This applies not only to shoe upper leather, but also to fashionable bags and leather accessories. Small, fine, filigree patterns and structures dominate. Accordingly, there is a trend away from large crocodile embossings to more fine-scaled reptile effects such as lizard and snake.