The Real Leather. Stay Different. Student Design Competitions provide great opportunities for the winners. This month, our 2024 winners, and 2023 alumnus Ana Del Rio, had the chance of a lifetime. They visited one of Europe’s most respected and finest leather manufacturers, and a valued partner of the RLSD Design Competitions, Rino Mastrotto.
L to R: Zhu Xinxin – China Mainland Overall Winner 2024, Roscha Dinler – International Footwear Winner 2024, Mor Elfassy – International Apparel Winner 2024, Matteo Mastrotto – CEO Rino Mastrotto, Bingbing Bai – International Accessory Category Winner 2024, Ana Del Rio – International Joint Overall Winner 2023
Established in 1998, from a family-owned company dating back to the 1950s, Rino Mastrotto is a premier producer of premium, luxury leather for footwear, leather goods, upholstery and the automotive, nautical and aviation industries.
Rooted in Italy, the group now provides luxury leather the world over. From the procurement of the world’s finest hides to the tanning to tailor them to the needs of a wide variety of users, Rino Mastrotto covers the full journey of leather from farm to product.
Inside the Veneto and Tuscany Tanneries
We visited the company’s tanneries in Veneto and Tuscany – giving our winners invaluable first-hand insight into the leather tanning process.
Matteo Mastrotto, Chief Executive Officer of CEO of Rino Mastrotto and a member of this year’s International Competition judging panel, gave us a warm welcome and shared his expertise throughout the visit.
Rino Mastrotto: Veneto Tannery
This exclusive tour provided our finalists with a unique opportunity to deepen their knowledge of their favourite material and understand the innovative, sustainable practices shaping the leather industry.
Rino Mastrotto: Tuscany Tannery
As well as the tannery visits, giving the party the chance to see how clean and ordered the tanning process is compared to the image of it that many people have, they visited Morelab, a company specialising in printing in leather and adding different textures to it. Morelab’s advanced machinery enables creativity and sustainability to merge.
Morelab Visit, L to R: Ana Del Rio, Mor Elfassy, Zhu Xinxin, Lorenzo Morelli – CEO Morelab, Bingbing Bai, Roscha Dinler. Morelab Thermoreactive leather sample
Ana Del Rio was last year’s UK Apparel and International People’s Choice Winner. She now has her own leathercraft brand and is devoted to the promotion of the material.
Speaking of the visit, she said: “It was all so wonderful! It was fantastic to see multiple locations across Italy and understand a bit more about Italian culture and history. I feel I have learnt lots more about leather production and processes and it was great to see the behind the scenes at luxury leather industry level. I thoroughly enjoyed understanding more about all the processes and machinery.
“I am in awe of Rino Mastrotto’s attention to detail and innovation. It is truly inspiring! I also admire their transparency and commitment to sustainability at every stage and I am so thankful for their generosity too.
“I hope to put this new knowledge learnt into practice and keep promoting leather through my work. I feel so happy to have found my passion within working with leather and so lucky to be able to work with it every day.”
In Venice, L to R: Bingbing Bai, Ana Del Rio, Jessica Tessari – Rino Mastrotto, Roscha Dinler, Mor Elfassy, Zhu Xinxin
For more about Rino Mastrotto, click here.
For more about Morelab, click here.
For a sneak peak into our Veneto Tannery visit, click here.
To hear what the students had to say, click here.
Josslyn Shi from California College of Art has been crowned Overall Winner of the Real Leather. Stay Different. International Student Design Competition at a glittering final event held at the U.S. Embassy in London.
Designer Alice Robinson admits that when she first began working in fashion, she hadn’t given much thought to the origins of the materials she was working with. During her student days studying womenswear, cost was always the main consideration.
Mor Elfassy is a third year Fashion Design student at Shenkar College of Engineering in Tel Aviv. She was at the RLSD International Final event at the US Embassy in London to show her winning apparel design, Form and Substance: The Duality of Human and
Oriol Clavell is a Catalan designer based in London, whose project Epentismo has won this year’s Apparel Category for the UK Student Design Competition. His work focuses on self-identity discovery – exploring cultural heritage as well as notions of
The Real Leather. Stay Different. Student Design competitions 2020/21 have concluded with winners announced from the UK, Italy, Taiwan and China.
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