Redesigning Levi's 511 Jeans | FASHION AS DESIGN

So I think the first garment that I'd like to talk about today is just a pair of Levi's
511, which is our slim fit.
One of our central, most popular fits.
But this one's been put through what we call the Wellthread process, which is an attempt
to develop a systems-based sustainability strategy that reconsiders every point of the
garment's lifecycle, understand its impacts, and seeks to recalibrate and reduce the impact.
All of that can be summed up rather easily by saying it's a design methodology that allows
the designer just to do the right thing whenever they have a choice.
So it says simply, "These Levi's jeans were designed for durability, a lifespan measured
not in years, but in decades.
We designed them to be strong.
The denim was made from extra-long staple supima cotton grown in the U.S., one of the
most durable cotton fabrics that we've ever made.
It was indigo dyed using a new system that saves up to 70% of the water in the dying
process, that's compared with other conventional processes.
They were made with easily extractable metal sundries for recyclability.
These jeans were sewn in a facility where we invest in workers through well-being programs
designed to benefit individuals as well as their families and communities.
These jeans represent responsible production.
They are our purest expression of sustainability.
This is a pair of Levi's jeans."
In the sustainability space, we often try to reduce our marketing messages to, like,
one word, you know, buzzy little tags or whatever.
The fact of the matter is that there's a degree of complexity to the science and a degree
of complexity to the systems design that goes into this.
A strategy that tries to communicate in a friendly way that complexity, I think, is
essential.
That we start respecting the complexity and respecting the consumer in a way that we tell
the fuller story, so that we're not trying to sell them on a one word tag.
You take it out of the bag and it's a pair of Levi's, and it's, in almost every way,
consistent with what you'd expect.
The only visual distinction is that what would be a leather pouch on the back is cotton.
And that cues you to the fact that every element of this jean is actually cotton.
A normal garment that...any garment that you're wearing that you think is cotton, the thread
is not cotton.
The labels likely aren't cotton, and the interfacing used to stabilize the garment is not cotton.
The zipper tapes aren't cotton.
The pocket bags aren't cotton.
They're all using synthetic materials to add strength at certain spots.
And that is just something that became normal industry practice.
You really need material purity for recycling to be effective.
Any polyester that would be present in the garment, when you try to recycle it, is going
to show up as trash in the second generation waste stream.
That means if it was, you know, if it was a polyester red tag, when you recycle it,
there would be little flecks of red in that recycled material.
Well, because this entire garment is made of cotton, when you break it down and garnate
it in the recycling process and extract color, you can extract color fully.
And so, this becomes a pure input into a recycling system.
Even more fundamental than the material components being all cotton, this jean is made out of
a fabric that came from a farm in California's Central Valley, where the farmer had invested
in a special hybrid of cotton that is much longer than any other cotton that's ever been
grown.
It's the longest stable, supima cotton ever grown.
Now, that length allowed us to do a really tight twist that we did just for, you know,
for the sake of using supima, a superior cotton quality that's softer.
Turned out, that high twist value created almost twice the strength of a normal pair
of jeans.
That a strategy that got us transparency into the field and got us this quality of softness
without using softeners and eliminating chemistry, also yielded tremendous strength value to
the point when we did the abrasion testing, we couldn't get a test to go far enough to
actually break this.
That this is, you know, I can't promise anything but, nearly indestructible denim here.
It can't be ripped apart.
So, by pursuing a sustainability strategy around labor transparency, we also unlocked
this tremendous value around extended durability.
We then sent that special cotton...where we'd visited the farm, we confirmed that the farmer
was using drip irrigation.
We selected the exact cotton we wanted, we had it sent to a very special mill.
A mill that had a partnership with a chemistry company that was experimenting in a new formulation
for low water dying.
And we were able to come up with a way of dying this indigo just as rich and dark as
any jean you'd ever seen from us, but using about 75% less water at the mill level.
Finding a farmer with really advanced irrigation practices.
Then we worked with a factory that knew how to do some of our waterless finishing processes.
We picked a factory that was also investing concurrently in building a public water infrastructure
so that the people who are making this garment, who had, you know, been suffering from poor
sanitation in their village, high rates of dysentery at the factory.
By helping the factory invest in the creation of public water infrastructure, we were able
to lower rates of dysentery and improve the general health of the whole community, not
just the people working in the factory, but the community around the factory, so improving
the worker's whole lives.
And for me, as a designer, that's the kind of good work I'd like to be doing.
And so, if I can create an arrangement of materials and a specific design that forces
itself to be allocated to that one factory that I know to be doing better work, then
I'm, in a way, promoting that work through the design process.
But at the end of the day, what you have is simply a soft, long-wearing, useful pair of
jeans that fits as good as any other [pair] that you would get from Levi's, but has this
whole complete story of both social value creation and responsible community stewardship
behind it.
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Redesigning Levi's 511 Jeans | FASHION AS DESIGN

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