Introducing Simple Pleasures – Sustainable Denim Wardrobe
What makes you feel good? What makes you feel happy? What things can reliably lift your spirits?
Diana Vreeland, the French-American fashion columnist and editor, once said: “Without emotion, there is no beauty.”
And it was these emotional questions that guided us through the latest Sustainable Denim Wardrobe Collection—”Simple Pleasures”—that turns dressing up into an act of pure joy. This collaborative project between the TENCEL™ Denim Team, Jeanologia and Betina Grosser is about exploring the little moments and things that bring us joy in everyday life. Simple pleasures that cut across lines of age, gender, and ethnicity. This collection is an ode to well-being from a perspective of ordinariness.
The sun shining through your window in the morning, your first sip of coffee, listening to your favorite song, seeing a rainbow, being surrounded by your loved ones… Each one of us has their own places, activities and things that elevate our inner strength and hope, especially as the pandemic has forced us to re-evaluate our priorities.
We believe garments can be a source of pleasure: Clothing is a basic need when presenting ourselves into society. But it is also a reflection of ourselves, and our social identities. From physical to emotional comfort, from beautifully constructed to meaningful garments, from sustainable processes and materials to self-expression: clothing can be a source of joy.
As Virginia Woolf wrote in “Orlando”: “Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.”
The Collection
Inspired by the freedom and spontaneity of the 1970s, we immersed ourselves in our “Simple Pleasures,” a dopamine trip, with a view to creating a print design that tells the stories of those feel-good-factors. But, because those delights can be so subjective and individual, it led us to a collaborative design process, in order to generate a much more diverse and relatable outcome.
Fifty people kindly took part in our online survey, sharing their own everyday sources of joy, helping to shape a print that shows the bright side of life and which is featured in some way throughout each and every garment in the collection: from fully printed garments, to hidden treasures like pocket linings and strategically positioned fine details.
Collaboration took part not only in the design step, but it actually has a central role in the project itself. Sustainable Denim Wardrobe is a collaborative project, now in its sixth edition, that showcases TENCEL™ branded lyocell fibers and brings together different styles in one curated denim lifestyle collection.
Created side by side with Jeanologia, sustainable finishing technology experts, its focus is responsible production from the fiber to the finishing. For this edition, Betina Grosser, Fashion Designer and Sustainable + Collaborative Design specialist, has joined the group to design the print and help tell this story.
This collection focuses on iconic garments—classic styles and fits—curated to create the feel good factor: from the visual and tactile inputs to the high quality materials and inventive processes brought by a creative group of collaborators. With TENCEL™ blended fabrics from Bossa, Cone Denim, Kaihara, Orta Anadolu and Prosperity, digital printing from House of U, garment construction by Denim Moda, threads from Coats and eco-technologies and garment finishing by Jeanologia. By pairing these iconic garments with the emotional content invested in the story of this collection, we are looking towards the concept of increasing the life of the garment durability, thus tackling obsolescence. Emotional durability as well as aesthetically sustainable. Meaningful and sustainable clothes, made to be cherished, designed to last.
Next post: The Print