This season’s hottest fashion, introduced under the Pierre Balmain designer label, are acid washed distressed jeans, designed by Christophe Decarnin. Stocks of these jeans are already depleted in many designer stores around the world. Other fashion brands such as Rock & Republic and Diesel have also followed suit, creating their own versions of tattered denim fashion. Celebrities Cory Kennedy and Kate Beckinsale have been caught on camera sporting refashioned revivals of the ’80s denim fashion phenomenon.
Faded, ripped, scrunched and “distressed” to the greatest degree, the Balmain designer jeans are controversial fashion items due to their hefty $1,000 price tag. Hot as this distressed denim might appear on the runway, there’s a sad tale to tell regarding denim production and the techniques employed in the stonewashing and distressing process.
Ecological impact of denim production
There are huge ecological concerns to this massive business. Approximately 450 million pairs of jeans are sold in U.S. alone every year, the majority of which will have been coloured with toxic dyes, acid bathed, sandblasted and chemically doused to give the aged, worn in look so highly sought after.
The life cycle of denim starts with the cotton boll, taken from vast cotton crops covering 2.4 percent of the world’s farm land. If not organically grown, the valuable crops will be drenched in toxic pesticides to protect them from insects and weeds, which ultimately pass into the soil and wreak havoc with wildlife.
Cotton fibres are spun into yarn that is “sized” using starch to give it strength and “mercerized” in caustic soda. Starch is biodegradable, but if released into rivers the microbes that devour it also consume oxygen. This in turn kills off the aquatic life in the water as does the toxic caustic soda.
It takes 1,500 gallons of water to produce the 1.5 pounds of cotton needed to make one pair of jeans. To achieve the correct blue shade, the denim is doused in vats of synthetic indigo. Environmental regulations are not upheld in many developing countries such as Mexico, where water and dyes are cheap. Here the old indigo dye, once used, will be released into the waterways untreated. Apart from the initial dyeing, the stone washing or distressing of the denim is achieved by repeated washing, rinsing, chemical blasting with toxic substances such as silica as well as dye stripping or bleaching with potassium permanganate. All these chemicals are toxic to wildlife if let into waterways and to the workers who inhale it. Tehuacan in Mexico has many factories dedicated to denim production. Here quite often the rivers turn blue with the cocktail of dye, bleach and detergents frequently discharged into the waterways untreated.
Friendly denim
There are, however, many up-and-coming companies producing “friendly denim” using organic cotton and more environmentally-friendly ways of distressing the fabric, such as using ozone. It is the responsibility of the consumer to look for these enlightened businesses by checking for labels showing “Fair Trade” and “Global Organic Standard” certification as well as the “recycling” logo.
Recycling denim
Some designers have solved the problem in another way by recycling old denim, naturally aged and worn by time, and re-styled and modelled it into new and inventive fashion designs. Denim seems to be an ongoing favourite on the fashion scene and as such needs to totally clean up its act to keep in step with the environmental and ethical requirements that are so rightly being put into place as a global fashion and textile effort.
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