Specialty Fabrics Review June 2022 - 28

" Business is definitely headed in the
" There is high
demand for our
products and what's
on order has already
been sold before
it arrives. "
Paul Grider
Dazian Creative
Fabric Environments
right direction, but it's been an up and
down ride, " says Paul Grider, director
of sales and marketing for Dazian
Creative Fabric Environments , which
has offices in New Jersey, Florida
and California. " About this time a
year ago is when the lights started
to flicker back on, and we started to
see more development coming from
the live events industry-all signs
were pointing at 2021 as being the
comeback year. "
But around Thanksgiving, of course,
is when the pandemic perked back up.
" It really set back the momentum we
were all building, " says Grider. " It was
devastating. However, we all expected
this new variant spike was going to
subside as quickly as it came on. We
were looking at the Super Bowl as
being that beacon of hope-for live
events to move forward, we knew there
would need to be fans in the stadium. "
SUPER BOWL A GOOD SIGN
" Luckily, " he says, " the Super Bowl
happened and it was a huge win, not
just for the L.A. Rams but for large,
in-person events going forward. In
fact, Dazian was involved in the NFL
Live Experience at the game, providing
various fabrics, rental drapery and
installation services.
" Our industry has not recovered
completely in any way, shape or
form, but it is definitely solidly and
consistently on the upward trend, "
says Joshua Alemany, director of
products for Rose Brand, a 100-yearold
company that supplies fabric,
decor and technology related to
scenery for theater, film, live events
and associated businesses.
Companies that provide theater
products beyond fabric say that
their diversification helped them
weather the crash. " We're not only
a fabrics company but for 30 years
Sustainability takes forefront
T
he role of sustainability is increasing in the
world of entertainment fabrics, as it is in
many places. It's important to a wide range of
entertainment stakeholders, according to Joshua
Alemany, director of products for Rose Brand:
" Architects and theatrical consultants we work
with were asking if we had some way of addressing
their clients' interest in sustainability. So working
with Milliken Textiles in South Carolina, we took
one of our most popular velours-particularly
used as the go-to fabric for stage draperies in new
construction-and Milliken was able to manufacture
it using a recycled fiber. The new fabric, ReVive™, is
a performance velour that is not only recyclable but
made from recycled fibers.
" Often a theater needs to show their donors and
their patrons what their money bought them. You get
pressure from stakeholders to show that you're paying
28 SPECIALTY FABRICS REVIEW / June 2022
attention to what's going on in the world. Suddenly,
now they could take a package of draperies that was
not just the main curtain that you see but hundreds
and hundreds of yards of black draperies that live
backstage as masking and reveal fabric, and tell them
these curtains were made using plastic bottles pulled
from and recycled from the waste stream.
" We can even give them a calculation that for every
yard of ReVive used in their curtains, they are pulling
12 bottles out of the waste stream. A typical curtain
package might result in as many as 10,000 bottles
pulled out of the waste stream.
" It's not green washing. It's a real material
difference we're making because we sell millions
of yards of velour a year. Even if only a small
portion of that is specified as ReVive, we're making
a meaningful difference in the number of bottles
floating around the waterways of the world. "
Specialty Fabrics Review June 2022

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