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Sustainable Fashion And The Stress Of Buying Blue Jeans

This article is more than 8 years old.

You don’t see many leopard-skin coats around these days, or handbags festooned with peacock feathers. The voices of environmentalists and animal rights activists have been heeded by fashion industry leaders and are having an impact on the world of luxury fashion.

Now those voices are moving down the price chain to “fast fashion” – low-cost luxury look-alikes replaced on the shelves every few weeks – alleging not just sweatshop labor conditions but hazardous environmental fallout from tons of items of clothing every year, discarded out of boredom rather than usage.

That amount is up 400% from 20 years ago, according to a new documentary about to be released entitled The True Cost, which claims your purchases of $20 jeans and $5 T-shirts is unethical because it encourages the over-production of cheap goods which pollute the environment during and after they are made. A white paper by INSEAD Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior Frederic Godart (a specialist in the luxury industry), claims “The introduction of ‘fast fashion,’ as a new business model has increased the rate of premature product replacement and fashion outmodedness.” All that discarded excess, he claims, is polluting the environment.

Mariette Hoitink, Managing Director of HTNK and C0- Founder of Denim City in Amsterdam

“But fashion is change,” you may argue – we look forward to each season’s “new look,” and it’s fun to buy something new. Not to mention keeping the wheels of industry turning. Based on what’s happened thus far on the socially-responsible fashion front to-date (remember Nike?) it’s a safe bet that the pendulum is beginning to swing towards what Godart calls “eco-sustainability and creativity, which will lea eventually to an institutional up-lifting of fashion.” Fashion, he claims, will someday soon become a leading ethical business. “Long-lasting beauty,” he says “is our global responsibility.”

The Denim Challenge

Into this quandary walked six years ago a tall, striking, outspoken, very focused Dutch woman with a degree in design, a head for business and a conscience for the planet. Mariette Hoitink today spends her days running HTNK, her eponymous fashion recruitment and consultancy, and her spare time running House of Denim, the non-profit foundation she created with local marketeer James Veenhoff to promote what she sees as Holland’s greatest contribution to the fashion world: blue jeans. This is more than an ephemeral ideology. House of Denim founded Denim City – a business and design center in Amsterdam’s old food halls (a la London’s Covent Garden) devoted exclusively to the fashion and sustainability of, basically, blue jeans. The organization has just completed its second annual “Denim Days” fashion event and is active in recruiting fashion business to the city.

No fewer than 15 brands design and develop their blue jeans in the Netherlands, among them Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Pepe Jeans, Scotch & Soda and G-Star Raw (which actually started in Holland some 25 years ago). Hoitink estimates that the average Dutch person owns seven pairs of jeans (go and count the number in your closet before you start exclaiming…) and with today’s “casual Fridays” and more relaxed business atmosphere, the demand is rising rapidly.

“Amsterdam is a small city in a big world of denim,” Hoitink says, “We have no supply chain, so we have to get ahead of the industry with technical facilities and design.” To this end, Hoitink has corralled one of the city’s vocational education schools in a cooperative degree-related program designing and creating blue jeans. And The Jean School, was born.

Denim City receives funding from the European Union and from private businesses interested in gentrifying the De Hallen area and creating new enterprise in the region. The mayor of Amsterdam is on board advocating he city’s ascendance as a center for denim, sustainability and innovation and has helped create scholarships and internships for students from abroad. Local designers – courtesy of Hoitink’s professional network – mentor the students, sharing designs and expertise. Says Thecla Schaeffer, chief marketing officer of G-Star Raw, “If the collaboration works out, we hire the student.”

There’s also a strong business ethic. During Amsterdam’s Denim Days in April, members of the Jean School’s first graduating class (with assistance from members of a premier Italian mall) were making bespoke blue jeans for customers worth $1,000 a pop. “That was really a donation to Denim City,” Hoitink is quick to point out.

'Towards A Brighter Blue'

But the project goes beyond design – one important aim is to make blue jeans more environmentally friendly because, they consume raw materials and use toxic dye.

"Blue jeans use lot of cotton, water," Hoitink reminds me.

And the blue dye is toxic. So we started a ‘blue lab’ to look into creating ecological denim, with collaborators from Turkey, Italy and Spain (three countries most involved in fabric production). Our slogan is 'towards a brighter blue.' We work on it; but you can’t do sustainability all at once. It’s a process.

That process includes creating different manufacturing processes that use less water and using different materials to reduce the need for cotton. “We are experimenting with hemp,” she says. “We call it our ‘Red Light Denim.’”

“Blue jeans are democratic fashion,” G-Star’s Schaeffer points out. “But denim and jeans are different from fashion: fashion is always about trends while jeans are more about product development – construction, fabric, shape. It’s more like architecture.“ Jean manufacturers keep some styles around forever (think Levis 501) because finding that perfect pair of jeans is a never-ending process and requires attention to detail on the part of the manufacturer. “Back pocket placement is MAJOR,” Schaeffer says, "because of how it makes your butt look. Buying jeans can be as stressful as buying a house! But people don’t throw away their jeans so readily. They are really the most sustainable piece of clothing in your wardrobe."

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