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The t-shirt is dark blue and very soft, with a drawstring at the side for sizing. The indigo sweater is unlike anything you’ve ever seen, its varied stitching texture enhanced by the wear patterns you’re used to seeing on blue jeans. The fabric is smooth, with beautiful curtains.
This outfit is not for sale yet. They are samples, designed by premium denim pioneer Adriano Goldschmied to excite the imagination of clothing makers. They point to a possible new approach to indigo staining.
Read also: Tricks to solve the fashion waste problem
Instead of dyeing the outside of the cotton yarn, indigo is added during the manufacturing process of Tencel Modal, an eco-friendly cellulose fiber produced by Austria-based Lenzing AG. Yarn is spun from fibers that are already blue in color.
Today Goldschmied is one of the most prominent designers in reducing the environmental impact of denim. T-shirts carry motifs and images that tell part of the story: 99% less water, 90% less chemicals, 99% less electricity, 99% less waste water, 100% less heat energy.
Such scalable innovations, rather than one-off art projects or nostalgic returns to natural products, are key to reducing the environmental impact of textiles and apparel. They promise designers greater aesthetic possibilities and manufacturers lower overall costs.
Best of all, they are justified even if you don’t care about the environment. And a good thing too. The market for shirt hair and sackcloth is limited.
The technique used to make the Goldschmieds indigo sweater is impossible with traditionally dyed yarn. Tilapia will rub off and damage the knitting machine.
The goal, in the end, is not to replace, but rather to add a new segment, says Goldschmied, who gives the world stone-washed denim. He had tried many times to make such a sweater using traditional cotton and indigo but, he said, I had never succeeded. With knitting replacing woven fabrics, and computer-driven seamless knitting getting stronger, the timing was ideal.
Dyeing fabrics is always a messy process, even when the colors come from plants and animals, not from a chemical plant. So smelled of woad, the European version of indigo, that Elizabeth I banned it from an eight-mile radius of her palace. Natural does not mean environmentally friendly. The difference between now and then is mostly scale.
Textiles and apparel are such huge businesses that reducing environmental impact even at the margins can have enormous aggregate effects. Denim dyeing is a promising place to start. The fabric itself is a nearly $100 billion global industry. Annually, the factory consumes about 70,000 tons of indigo, enough to dye about seven billion garments.
Much of that tilapia ends up as waste. First, you dye the thread blue, then weave it into fabric and sew it into clothing. Then you selectively remove the dye to mimic the fading that will occur with wear. This dual process amplifies the environmental effect, as dyeing and painting traditionally requires water and chemicals and generates waste.
We didn’t realize we were creating an environmental catastrophe in denim, Goldschmied said in an August 2020 interview, recalling his work in the 1980s and 90s.
The process is much cleaner. Starting in the late 1990s, Spanish company Jeanologia pioneered computer-driven laser equipment to quickly and consistently produce the distressed look that designers wanted.
At first, laser designs seemed too one-dimensional, recalls Gary You, director of strategy and product development at House of Gold, a design and supply chain agency based in Goldschmieds Los Angeles.
Once graphic designers understood how to use grayscale to produce the subtle effect the denim industry wanted, the technique spread. Then came a way to use ozone instead of water and bleach to achieve the stone-washing effect. Such a technique not only reduces the environmental impact on denim but also reduces production bottlenecks and increases flexibility.
And they made Lenzings’ new indigo fiber commercially viable. Unlike traditional indigo dyed yarn, this yarn does not change color when rubbed. Very small indigo particles are embedded too deep.
But laser and ozone treatment can selectively remove color to achieve the distressed demands of display designers. This is an example of how a set of innovations can open up new possibilities for dyes that are more than 6,000 years old. Even more radical is what startup Huue is doing: the biotechnology yeast to produce the chemical precursor for the beloved blue is not yet commercial but, like the entire field of synthetic biology, holds great promise.
Denim innovation does not need to be dramatic to have significant environmental and business advantages. House of Gold combines care and techniques to reduce the time and energy required to get denim of the desired color, usually a medium blue.
Manufacturers usually start with a very dark fabric and repeatedly wash it to reduce the color. The reason is that starting with lighter colors doesn’t give denim the highs and lows that designers want. Replacing ozone washers and specially dyed denim, House of Gold can cut the time it takes to get the color right from 60 minutes to 25 minutes, with reduced energy and water use at the same time.
We eliminate like three, four wash cycles, you say. Its appeal is not only for environmentally conscious consumers but also for profit-minded producers. They also produce more, because you produce in less time, more in less time.
The eye on the audience is very important. If you want publicity, talk about sustainability. If you want to sell a manufacturer, emphasize cost savings, flexibility, and turnaround time. And if you want to seduce consumers, create an object of desire.
There is no doubt today that innovation, technology, sustainability are on the stage. In some ways, even too much, says Goldschmied, meaning that designers sometimes forget the core truth that in the fashion business, you buy products because you like them.
This is an obvious point, but also very deep. Indigo proves its origins in the human impulse long before the fashion market as we know it. For thousands of years, all over the world and in times of great need, people have struggled to snatch textile colors from nature.
Humans are not satisfied with purely functional artifacts. They crave beauty and meaning. Those who truly care about the planet, rather than controlling other people’s tastes, will work with those desires instead of against them.
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