We all set aside six months when my sister, brother, and I decided to take our brand offline in 2017 to find a better way of making jeans. We relaunched our brand with all the sustainable tools we learned and applied over the past 18 months. A year later, Triarchy was on a new sustainable path.
Parallel to our mission of making jeans better, sustainability was rapidly losing its credibility in the fashion industry. The pandemic proved that consuming things for their sake was not a good idea. Brands either increased their efforts to improve their brands or doubled down on making them more profitable. The ‘S’-word began to fall.
Greenwashing does not always mean that the victim is being malicious. It is more often than not a matter of many people along the supply chain taking “facts” as facts and passing them on to the final consumers without questioning whether or not they are true.
Something too good can be true. I quickly realized that if I didn’t ask tough questions, I wouldn’t be able to know the truth behind the information I was giving my customers. If this were my way of stewardship, I wouldn’t be able to run a business. I concluded that sustainability was not a food service menu everyone wanted but that it was my responsibility to discover what sustainability meant.
If you make claims without a governing body, who are you to dispute them? A vendor might tell a designer that a fabric’s stretch is made from recycled water bottles. The designer may then take that information back to their marketing team. They might hang it up in a store and say, “Hey, that’s amazing! We use recycled water bottles!” If a customer sees it and says, “Hey, this is amazing!” does that mean they did a good job? No, because the tough questions at the top would be, “Oh, that’s interesting. Tell me more.”
Is recycled plastic keeping the virgin plastic market thriving and thriving? Are recycled plastics just new garbage made from old junk? Will recycled plastic be thrown away 200 years after its life expectancy?
This is because I experienced it. I believed the recycled water bottle story, and I followed it. But I knew something wasn’t right. I started shouting about fiber separation technologies, which are lovely. But my common sense said that I couldn’t cry about how great this technology was for garment end-of-life problems.
These technologies will only be used if the care label is removed at any time during the garment’s lifetime. They can only tell what the fiber content is if they know. The unique recycled water bottle story suddenly developed so many holes that the bottle could no longer hold any water. We realized it wasn’t just unsustainable but also that this game of sustainable phones was threatening the integrity of the “S” word.
I find it amazing that plastic water bottles can be turned into stretch filaments to make clothing. Finding a purpose for something that would otherwise go to waste is excellent. But what is the point of simply recycling plastics? This tech is sustainable if I use it. Use it! You can improve it. Create a scanning system that will make fiber separation more efficient. Don’t be afraid to use it, but don’t buy blindly into the fabric, then shout that the brand is sustainable just because a supplier said so. This is greenwashing to me.
Because there is no sustainable fashion brand, the word sustainability has lost its credibility. We should not use the “S” word to describe new products made from virgin or blended materials. It doesn’t make sense.
If we look at the alphabet literally, the letter R is what we see. It stands for responsibility and integrity. Because it provides a framework for a brand to make better jeans, I love the word commitment.
Being responsible means asking tough questions and not being afraid to ask them. Only by identifying the problem can we find solutions.
PLASTIC-FREE PLASTIC PARTNERS
With our 2018 relaunch, I removed plastic stretch from our brand. It was problematic for a denim brand not to offer stretch jeans. The plastic margin was incompatible with our responsible manufacturing lens, so it wasn’t an option. This did, however, spark the interest of denim manufacturers. It was a quick way to turn a meeting that could have taken 90 minutes into a 20-minute one. I looked at their collections and then told them I couldn’t look at any with poly-based stretch, whether recycled or not. There was so much more to see.
Candiani, one of the denim mills in Italy, developed a new type of stretch after a lot of research and asking tough questions. It consisted of 96% Organic Cotton and 4% Natural Rubber and was a natural, breathable stretch denim product. This product, as it stands now, uses virgin rubber. We are currently asking if it is possible to use recycled rubber. To make the rubber stretchable, would we need anything?
It was brought to the market for women in 2019, and since then, we have been able to offer stretch jeans all year without any plastic in them, a denim brand that does not sell plastic stretch jeans. This was proof that we can make difficult decisions that negatively impact our business for a while. However, it also inspired our partners to discover new and better ways of making what we love about denim. Once that technology was available, we could adopt it to share it with others.
This story can be displayed in a store. I understand that it is a great idea. However, when I removed my ego from this whole process, I realized that sustainable for Triarchy and me was not an appropriate word to describe the reality of what we were doing. Additionally, there needs to be more understanding of sustainability in the fashion industry context.
FROM RESPONSIBLE TO SUSTAINABLE
We would all be able to see what we’re doing and not worry about the hype surrounding the ‘Sword. Fast fashion retailers may try to make it look worse by selling it seasonally, but it will eventually be reinterpreted with the intended meaning.
However, responsibility offers a new beginning. We all know what “responsible” is, which differs from the ‘Sword. We all know the difference between responsible and irresponsible business decisions. There are no excuses for operating under the responsibility.
I hope the industry’s well-intentioned take a step back from S to R. This will allow us to distinguish the greenwashers from those who want to do the right thing.
About The Author: Adam Taubenfligel, Creative Director in Triarchy, has worked on the factory floor of Italy, learning everything about denim from the denim masters. He travels the globe in search of fashion inspiration and sustainable innovation.
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