Armedangels & sustainable design: “Not just throwing nice products on the market”
German sustainable fashion label Armedangels has revised its denim
collection. The new jeans for women and men not only fit better but have
also been produced in a water-saving manner and completely without the use
of chemicals. Sara Maier from Armedangels talks about the difficulty and
beauty of working sustainably as a designer.
Armedangels has been offering denim since 2015 but now the label wants
to increase its focus further. The market is undeniably huge, with a pair
of jeans being a staple in almost everybody’s wardrobe. At the same time,
denim is considered one of fashion’s dirtiest secrets; and that’s really
saying something in an industry that’s often criticised for its huge
environmental footprint. Producing a regular pair of jeans consumes 8,000
liters of water on average, according to Armedangels. To achieve certain
effects, like the ‘used look’ for example, it takes as much as two
kilograms of chemicals. So sustainable design means considering all stages
of a garment’s processing, from design to production and finishing.
“I like the holistic approach very much,” says Sara Maier, product
manager at Armedangels, in an interview with FashionUnited. “I feel like
my head is used very differently here. I didn’t just want to throw a nice
product on the market.”
By revising its collection, Armedangels is catching up in a market in
which brands like Swedish label Nudie Jeans or Dutch brand Kings of Indigo
have specialised in sustainable denim. Even traditional denim brands like
Levi’s or G-Star Raw have joined the Greenpeace detox campaign and have
pledged to eliminate toxic substances from their clothing.
Authentic denim looks
Armedangels’ jeans revision resulted in five new sizes for women and
one new size for men. A pair of jeans has an average life span of seven
years and that’s why designer Sara Maier tries to design styles that won’t
go out of fashion any time soon. For her, this includes skinny fits for
high and mid waist jeans as well as ‘casual mom jeans’ for women.
“It’s about creating authentic denim looks that stay in your wardrobe
for a long time,” says Maier. “Then denim can be a sustainable product,
too.”
But for the designer who aims to reinvent sustainability, this is far
from the end of her story. As product manager, Sara Maier is responsible
for the entire process, from fabric development and design to pricing – a
completely different style of working than before.
“Before, I did not even request the wash recipe for a denim because
nobody was interested in it,” remembers Maier who was a designer at various
fashion companies before working at Armedangels and beginning to focus on
sustainability. “It was never important how a manufacturer actually
achieved a certain look of a pair of jeans.”
Steps involved in denim production:
- 1. Cotton cultivation and harvesting.
- 2. Cotton ginning and spinning into yarn.
- 3. Dyeing the yarn blue with indigo colour.
- 4. The indigo-coloured warp thread is interwoven with white weft yarn
to create denim fabric. - 5. Removing starch from the denim fabric to make it softer.
- 6. Cutting the denim fabric and sewing it into a pair of jeans.
- 7. Chemicals or mechanical processes produce used or other denim
effects. - 8. Applying buttons, rivets and leather patches and removing loose
threads.
Source: Alliance for Responsible Denim
When dyeing the fabrics with indigo, Armedangels has managed to use less
water and salt starting from its Fall/Winter 2018 collection. To produce
lighter coloured jeans, ozone and lasers were used instead of chemicals.
Lasers also save 62 percent of the energy and 67 percent of the water than
traditional methods, according to the company’s campaign brochure.
“We achieve washes and lighter colours of which we we could only dream
of previously. One of the first sentences when I started here was: Making
light-coloured denims is not sustainable,” says Maier. “Now I can say: It
works, you just have to work very hard on it.”
In today’s fashion industry, the buzzword of sustainability may cover
various approaches. While Kings of Indigo, for example, reveals its supply
chain on the website, British fashion label Tom Cridland promises that its
Half Century Jeans will last 50 years – repair and replacement included.
Sustainability is about detail
Armedangels always uses organic cotton certified by the Global Organic
Textile Standard (GOTS). That means that no toxic chemicals were used and
sustainable wastewater management was practiced.
Sustainability can come down to the very last detail: Sara Maier also
switched all the buttons of the denim collection to stainless steel, as no
chemicals are used in the process of colouring steel. Also, when selecting
its suppliers, Armedangels is very thorough, visiting each one personally
on site to check working conditions and energy usage.
“For many, sustainability is just a trend that is popping up now. It is
an extensive topic and we realised it’s best when we send our people, who
then really have the knowhow to find out if we are talking about the same
kind of sustainability.”
To implement its own developments, such as light-coloured jeans in its
upcoming Spring/Summer collection, Armedangels has also teamed up with
Turkish denim producer ISKO. There is no lack of future plans for Maier;
she is already looking at recycled materials and biodegradable spandex.
When working with sustainability in denim, it’s also important to be flexible, she says. “I’m not obsessed with having a product look exactly like I have envisioned, but I rather work with my supplier and during the process we explore the existing limits together.”
This article was originally published on FashionUnited.de.
Translated and edited by Simone Preuss.
Photos: Armedangels