For Autumn Winter 21, Rolf Ekroth gets inspired by 80’s horror movies, Finnish heathen habits and traditions, Nordic farming culture, and the iconic photographer, Leo Montonen, who was famous for capturing life in the Finnish countryside during the 1920s and 1930s.

One of the key elements in Ekroth’s collection is straw – olki in Finnish. For his collection, Ekroth has been using Bio2™Textile, a new fabric developed by the Finnish energy company Fortum, which drives change by improving resource efficiency with smart solutions and sustainable materials. It is a cotton-like fabric based on a new Finnish fibre innovation, which uses agricultural waste straw as a base material. Finland is a forerunner for new materials and is home to several fibre innovations that help the global textile industry become more sustainable. Rolf Ekroth is the first fashion designer to embrace Bio2™Textile.

“Straw has pulled Finland through many difficult times. It fed animals during long winters and warmed the shoes of labourers working in the forest. During wartime, it was even used as a base for bread,” Rolf Ekroth explains. “What’s more, it has a great symbolic meaning to Finns, since it was also a popular decorative material – first for the pagans to welcome the beginning of the spring, and then later to celebrate Christmas.”

Ekroth has used Bio2™Textile in many of the products in his collection such as T-shirts, hoodies, skirts and capes. The straw theme is also apparent in the collection’s camouflage prints that are based on Finnish fields, as well as prints inspired by himmeli - the straw mobiles made by Finnish pagans.

Bio2™Textile: uniquely sustainable bio-based textile fiber for a cleaner world The production and use of textile fibres, such as polyester and cotton, is unsustainable in terms of water and chemical use, as well as emissions. At the same time, we waste millions of tons of straw – mostly by burning it, causing severe pollution problems. We at Fortum turn this problem into a solution.

Our Bio2™Textile uses straw, that typically discarded as agro-residue, as its raw material. Replacing fossil-based raw materials with this residue reduces land degradation and deforestation. We apply a unique technology that achieves raw material efficiency of up to 90%, minimizing the amount of waste and the environmental impact from CO² emissions, water consumption and use of chemicals. All this contributes to the textile’s excellent life-cycle assessment (LCA) results.

The biomass-based Bio2™Textile fibers can replace unsustainable materials in numerous applications. Combining agro-residue-based raw material with sustainable fiber technology presents an answer to the urgent need to replace the unstainable textile materials currently on the market. The Bio2™Textile fiber offers high quality, renewable and recyclable solution that has never been seen before. It satisfies the growing need of sustainable textile fibers.