"Reduce, Reuse, Recycle": how a sustainable collection of Tommy Jeans is born

The turnover of the denim market amounts to over $70 billion a year with an annual growth rate of 2% – a huge industry, both for earnings and for its impact on the environment. Denim factories are one of the most polluting of the whole industry. Their use of water, chemical and energy resources is so intensive that to produce a single pair of jeans, for example, you need 9500 liters of water and as many as 15 different dyeing tanks - which are then often disposed of in the premises waterways. China's denim capital, Xintang, home to a third of all jeans produced in the world, has become one of the most alarming examples of the consequences of indiscriminate pollution: river waters have turned blue or even black due to chemical dyes and bleach; the soil has prohibitive concentrations of lead, copper and cadmium and the health of hundreds of thousands of workers is being tested by very precarious conditions. 

Tommy Jeans and his mother-company, PVH, began working on their sustainable goals when they realized the impact that jeans production alone had on the environment: PVH produces 15 million pairs of jeans a year, using one hundred thousand million liters of water (more than double the water consumption of a city like Amsterdam) and with greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 330 million kilos of annual carbon dioxide. 

In a company where 83% of young consumers choose to buy a brand also based on the sustainability of its policies, Tommy Jeans wanted to strive to create a product that is both fully circular in its reuse of materials and careful not to alter the environmental balance with its practices. The denim produced by the brand is in fact 100% recycled cotton and recovered from the waste materials of the factories: the waste is cleaned, reduced into cotton fibers and then yarns; these yarns are tinged again and used for rigid styles or joined with recycled elastin fibers for stretch styles; the individual parts of denim are then assembled using polyethylene threads recovered from plastic bottles and while the finishes employ low-impact techniques that substantially reduce the water and energy resources normally used. 

The result of these processes is the FW20 collection by Tommy Jeans, the first of its kind to be produced from completely recycled materials. To underline how its good practices also concern communities close to the brand and not only environmental policies, the brand has created a campaign starring an eclectic mix of creatives among musicians, models, DJs and dancers composed of Sheani Gist, Havana Liu, Lucia Luciano, Wooseok Lee, Ohkemo, Salem Mitchell, G Meyer and Carlie Hanson who brought their personal creative point of view in the realization of the video making of the campaign. In addition, the collection presents for the first time the Critter Print – a new embroidery pattern inspired by the signature of the founder of the brand.

Tommy Jeans Recycled Denim collection is already available online on the brand's official website