Queen Letizia’s dress for Friday’s Princess of Asturias Awards began with the fabric, not the design.
The Spanish queen attended the ceremony in Oviedo wearing a garment made from Pyratex Circ Lyocell 3, a fine-knit fabric developed by the Madrid-based textile research company using recycled material from textile-to-textile recycling specialist Circ.
What distinguishes the project is how the dress came together. According to Pyratex, the fabric was selected before the garment was designed, with its fluid drape, soft hand and knitted structure guiding adjustments throughout construction.
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The material contains recycled cellulose recovered from discarded textiles, although its finished appearance offers little indication of its origins.
Pyratex Circ Lyocell 3 is made entirely from lyocell, a regenerated cellulosic fiber. Thirty percent of the cellulose used to produce the fiber comes from recovered textile materials, while the remaining 70 percent comes from wood pulp. The resulting knit has a subtle sheen and a fluid drape intended to evoke silk.
Circ’s technology for processing blended textiles—particularly those containing cotton and polyester—enables it to recover the recycled content.
Such blends have long challenged textile recycling because the two fibers require different recovery processes. Circ uses a hydrothermal method to separate the cotton-derived cellulose from polyester, allowing both material streams to be recovered for use in new fibers.
The reclaimed cellulose can then be processed into lyocell, replacing a portion of the virgin wood pulp typically used to manufacture the fiber.
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