The Wool Lab, a seasonal guide to the most inspiring wool trends and best products, is created to inspire and inform fashion professionals regarding the infinite potential of Merino wool. A trendbook and a sourcing guide, the tool is the result of extensive research undertaken by The Woolmark Company through its global network to select the best wool products worldwide and identify the emerging trends emerging from fashion, design, art, pop culture, music and other fields.
The Wool Lab is created each season in collaboration with the world’s most innovative and quality-oriented spinners and weavers. It is a collection of the most beautiful wool products, commercially available, and in line with the leading fashion and textile trends.
The tool is available free of charge and upon request for designers, manufacturers, retailers, fashion and apparel brands and to all the professionals of the fashion industry, to provide a concrete sourcing service, putting them in contact with the world’s best wool suppliers.
Below is a preview of some of their Spring/Summer 2015 guide, Balera and Elements. You can view the entire seven inspirational themes here for both Men's and Women's.
BALERA
Inspirations
During the post-war period in Italy the balera, or dance hall, started to diffuse throughout Italy. Typical and popular dance halls, these places gathered people who wanted to rediscover life's simple pleasures and joy of living through dance after war's deprivations. The theme recalls that joy can be combined with the will of beauty and elegance in a simple and accessible way. Classic colours and fancy stripes for the men; floral prints on the ultra-feminine women dresses.
Materials
Wool combined with cotton, nylon and viscose with washed finishing. Fancy patterns and structures such as stripes, vichy, seersucker, chambray and micro check. Yarns are mouliné, mélange and crepe.
ELEMENTS
Inspirations
The theme embodies the perfect combination between fashion and architecture, where cuts and shapes of dresses are inspired by the same geometrical lines of buildings. Elements illustrates a search for cleaning and linearity, typical of Japanese minimalism, with colours inspired by building materials such as chalk and cement. Touches of green and blue complete this lucid vision as a building standing out against the sky, but with its feet concretely anchored to the ground. Focus on fabric structures that are never dull.
Materials
100 per cent wool or wool mixed with cotton, silk, linen or viscose. Structures and patterns reflect the mood of the theme: gauze, ottoman, honeycomb, ajouré, graphic jacquard. Wool Jersey is here very important, also patterned.
