Sustainability Isn’t Just for Rich White Kids, Unspun Says
“I know everybody wants to get good news,” Adriano Goldschmied, founder and creative director of Genious Group, said to the crowd at the SJ x Rivet Sustainability conference last week. “But I’m not bringing good news for the situation that we have in Los Angeles.”
The Godfather of Denim was referring to the denim community in the City of Angels that’s becoming warped as brands continue treating sustainability as a marketing opportunity. The reality, the renowned Italian designer said, is that sustainable denim production is too nuanced for such reductions.
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“Manufacturing in L.A., honestly, there are no investments; the old generation of manufacturing are just asking, ‘how big is our cut?’ They don’t have a vision of the future or take an opportunity,” he said. “When everybody is telling me, ‘Los Angeles is expensive,’ I see that as an opportunity to elevate operations. L.A. should become a hub of technology, innovation—bringing all [of] what is happening now in the denim [world] here because we know how to make it happen.”
Rivet’s executive editor Angela Velasquez explored this idea and more with several West Coast denim-heads during a panel discussion dubbed “Conveying a Sustainable Message.”
For ética Denim, evolving sustainability beyond a buzzword is necessary to stop generating waste and transition away from old-school habits. That’s why the relatively nascent brand recently launched InCloud Treatment. This technology leverages “nanotechnology at the molecular level” to treat fabrics and fibers. In doing so, the process eliminates the need for toxic chemicals and uses 90 percent less water than “prevailing industry benchmarks.”
“The beautiful thing about InCloud is that we can replicate it anywhere in the world, that technology can go anywhere,” said CEO Agustin Ramirez. “I really want to do a call of action to everybody: all together, we can save the most valuable thing we have in our hand: the water.”
Meanwhile, Unspun wants to “bite off” the woven industry of apparel to move the needle.
“We strongly believe that the only two effective ways to make rapid sustainability progress is either through regulation or through innovation,” Kevin Martin, co-founder and chief operating officer of Unspun, said. “And frankly, we were not smart enough to take the regulation route.”
The Oakland-based B Corp recently acquired $32 million to scale its Walmart-approved 3D weaving technology in Europe. Dubbed Vega, the technology addresses pain points like on-demand production, nearshoring and overconsumption. More importantly, Vega serves as a “Venn diagram” of merging sustainability and profitability.
“We don’t just want to make sustainable things for the rich white kids in San Francisco,” Martin said. “Fundamentally, sustainability can’t just be a nice-to-have or an expensive thing on top—it needs to come from, like, can it still just be the fastest, best, cheapest thing?”
For Goldschmied, this focus on sustainable technology fundamentally impacts his design process.
“Without technology today, we are not able to make any strategy for sustainability,” Goldschmied said, referencing material and technical innovations out of France and Boston. “Technology from one thing, and biotechnology from the other side, are the next revolution. I love people that are thinking out of the box, like this guy here,” he said about Martin, “who invented something that was totally unexpected.”
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