Top 10 Carved in Blue Stories in 2021
2021 has been a year of recovery for the denim industry and beyond. We’re still grappling with the global pandemic and all the challenges that come with it, but there has been some return to normalcy in retail, workplaces and our personal lives.
It’s also been a year of doubling down on sustainability. And in spite of the disruptions of the past two years, we at TENCEL™ introduced a number of new fiber developments this year.
We ran the numbers to see which posts got the most attention in 2021. Common themes were innovation, indigo, circularity and changing the fashion system.
Read on for the 10 most popular stories of this year. We look forward to bringing you more news, insights and conversations in 2022!
10. Slideshow: REFIBRA™ Technology Creations
Since it launched on the market in 2017, Lenzing’s circular TENCEL™ x REFIBRA™ Lyocell has been adopted by forward-thinking brands and designers.
From jeans and shirting to dresses, the recycled material creates apparel with a lower impact. To make REFIBRA™, Lenzing blends pre- and post-consumer cotton scraps with wood pulp, spinning them into biodegradable and compostable fiber.
9. Hong Kong Denim Festival Targets Future Talents
The denim industry is quickly changing in response to pressures such as the need for sustainability. As the business looks to tackle these challenges, one way to accelerate innovation is through collaboration with new minds.
This year’s Hong Kong Denim Festival was themed “Denim Tomorrow,” focusing on bringing together the industry’s next generation of designers and creators with established denim producers. From February to March, the event hosted exhibitions, workshops, forums, shopping and more. While the event happened in-person with safety protocols in place, the festival added virtual experiences for attendees who could not make it to the physical venues.
8. Looking Back to Move Forward
Indigo is an ancient dye, used by many civilizations – including Mayan, Egyptian, Japanese and Indian cultures. When indigo became a commodity it started its journey via the earliest trade routes finding its way to Greece and Rome around 300 BC. The Greeks named the blue pigment ‘indikon’ meaning ‘from India’ and at that time it was considered a luxury item. Later it attracted the name “Blue Gold” due to the demand as a high-value trading commodity. ‘Indikon’ became ‘indigo’ in English.
Regardless if indigo is extracted from plants or produced synthetically, the principle of dyeing indigo has never changed.
- Dissolving the dye by reduction involving vatting
- Dyeing from the vat
- Oxidising in the air
7. Video: Behind the Scenes of ‘Seed of Joy’ by Adriano
Adriano Goldschmied has been in the denim world for decades. During that time, he has seen the toll the industry put on the environment and has committed himself to producing more eco-friendly denim.
In the 1990s, the designer began using TENCEL™ Lyocell for some pieces as a step toward more sustainability. Now, he and his team at creative agency House of Gold have become among the first to use our latest low-impact fiber, TENCEL™ Modal with Indigo Color technology, for a collection.
6. All in the Family with Hiut Denim’s David Hieatt
Hiut Denim’s backstory has family ties, but it is also about the love that exists for a local community.
Husband and wife duo David and Clare Hieatt founded Hiut Denim to bring denim manufacturing jobs back to their town of Cardigan in Wales. The town’s denim factory, which employed around 400 people and had produced about 35,000 jeans per week, closed down after three decades in 2002. Hiut Denim opened about a decade later in Cardigan, allowing local skilled denim makers to resume doing what they know best. Today, Hiut Denim’s “grand masters” only make 100 pairs of jeans per week, focusing on quality over quantity.
Hiut is not the Hieatts’ first clothing venture as a couple. Prior to founding their denim brand, the pair created eco-friendly clothing label Howies in 1995.
5. Brazil Innovation Hub Buoys Denim Development
Amsterdam-based nonprofit the House of Denim Foundation is on a mission to make denim more sustainable and smarter through education and community.
In service of this goal, the organization’s subsidiary Denim City founded an innovation campus in Amsterdam in 2014. Now, the Denim City footprint is extending to Brazil with a new location in São Paulo, opened last fall.
Like the location in the Netherlands, Denim City São Paulo is focused on connecting the next generation of denim creators with the leading minds in the field to drive sustainability. An on-site academy enables professionals and graduates to learn about topics such as techniques in laundry, the basics of denim production and how to position a denim brand.
4. Arvind’s Knit Denim Supports Consumers on the Move
Even before the pandemic, consumers were increasingly turning to athleisure as streetwear. But during Covid-19, this quest for comfort has accelerated.
India’s Arvind Limited is taking note of the need for stretchier indigo fashions with its Infiknity collection. Made with processes including circular knitting for seamless construction, the textiles are designed for the active individual.
3. How Emotional Connection Could Tackle Fashion’s Waste Problem
Consumers today often have a very temporary attachment to the items in their wardrobes. Fast fashion offers an endless cycle of trends that has created a throwaway culture around apparel and footwear. According to a 2015 study from Barnardos, one in three young women in Britain consider clothing to be old after wearing it less than three times.
A dissertation from Nottingham Trent University fashion design graduate Nadia Hodges explores how to transform the attitude toward fashion ownership to reduce overconsumption and get consumers to rewear their clothes. In the research, she writes, “There is a necessity for creativity and innovation to re-style, re-use and re-purpose our existing wardrobe in order to adapt to our shrinking attachment and attention spans. We need to replace a throwaway society with a culture that fosters strong person-product relationships, if we want any chance of combatting the fashion industry’s direct waste problem and the Western world’s addiction to reinventing our wardrobes.”
2. Adriano Goldschmied’s TENCEL™ Collaboration Explores Broader Indigo Applications
Lenzing’s recent launch, TENCEL™ Modal with Indigo technology, offers the denim industry an opportunity to think outside the box in using the indigo-dyed fibers. As we debuted these fibers on the market, who better than the Godfather of Denim Adriano Goldschmied to pioneer this new product?
Adriano, who founded creative agency House of Gold as well as denim labels including AG Jeans, was among the first to create a commercial collection using TENCEL™ Modal with Indigo technology. Dubbed Seed of Joy, the line’s name is meant to reflect the added creative and fashion freedom possible with these new fibers, as well as the material’s sustainability benefits.
“The TENCEL™ brand is leading revolutionary change for the denim industry, and it has always been one of my go-to eco-fibers for my collections,” said Adriano.
1. Introducing TENCEL™ Modal with Indigo Color Technology
The lush indigo color has been highly coveted since ancient times. But dyeing fabric in the blue hue has come at a huge environmental cost.
Conventional indigo dyeing needs chemicals to make the pigment water soluble. The process of dyeing starts by dissolving the dye in a vat, followed by immersing yarn in the vat and then oxidizing the material. Indigo also has a low affinity for cellulosic fibers such as cotton, hemp or TENCEL™ fibers, so achieving a rich blue color typically requires multiple repetitions of the dyeing and oxidizing process. Aside from using potentially harmful chemicals, the process uses large volumes of water, thereby generating significant amounts of effluents.
Lenzing is changing the game for indigo application with its recent launch. Our TENCEL™ branded modal fiber with Indigo technology infuses pigment into fibers directly during the spinning process. To create modal fibers, Lenzing has to first turn wood pulp into a liquid form, or dope. In dope dyeing, color is added to this liquid before it is spun, cutting back significantly on the use of resources.