Browse Features 2023 - insidedenim: Global denim industry news and vie

Could proteins from feathers provide the building blocks for a new fibre to rival polyester and silk? Bloom Labs believes it has found a solution that could be a good fit for the denim sector.

The need to increase fibre-to-fibre recycling and lack of progress in achieving this is being called out by every sustainable fashion industry coalition and report.

We are all familiar with the names of famous Japanese denim mills, located between Kurashiki and Hiroshima.

No sodium hydrosulfite, very little water. High frequency sound waves. This is the new recipe for indigo dyeing that Pure Denim and Sonovia are working on.

Cotton always seems to bounce back from challenging times. Here, a senior vice-president of industry body Cotton Incorporated explains how.

Political support for linen and hemp is growing in northern France and could result in a new sovereign fund to help growers, scutchers and spinners drive innovation. The industry welcomes this but is also focusing on building bridges with garment brands.

Bestseller ponders some of the key threads that together make up the multidimensional tapestry that is its ever-evolving circularity road map.

Epic Group’s executive vice-president of innovation and sustainability, Vidhura Ralapanawe, decodes how its newest ‘green’ micro-factory in Bangladesh leveraged its immediate surroundings to achieve the world’s highest LEED score in its category.

A leather bag designer decided to create a perfect pair of jeans. Her first step? Getting rid of standard industry measurements.

Dyeing is considered one of the most polluting processes in the textile industry, and growing garment waste is an issue the industry can no longer shrug off.

‘Out-of-the-blue’ denim products make up a small part of the market, but they play an important role in providing variety in the all-indigo world of blue jeans.

If you have never been to Bangladesh, you should be prepared to see quite a difference between its former reputation and expectations and today’s reality. A telling example is the Denim Expert Ltd’s ready-made garment factory in Chittagong.

Lawyers in the UK have begun legal proceedings on behalf of garment workers in Asia in a potential landmark case. Retail group Tesco and quality and safety audit body Intertek face action over the alleged treatment of workers at a jeans factory in Thailand.

Advance Denim’s general manager, Amy Wang, takes stock of the competitive advantages of the company’s latest factory, challenging the “common” misconception that Vietnamese-made denim is in any way “more basic”.

With the fashion industry’s complex global supply chain and factories located in low-wage countries, ensuring production workers receive decent pay is not easy.

Originally based in Syria, Sharabati Denim operates two facilities, one in Egypt and the other in Kadirli, in the south of Turkey, where construction began in 2015. With continued investment in new generation equipment, this site has progressively expanded to double and mirror the production of the Egyptian mill.

With growing demand for recycled content of any kind and a pressing need to find suitable and sustainable solutions for waste, excess stock and end-of-life clothes, denim mills are investing in closing the loop themselves.

His eternal optimism in a world of indigo means one of denim’s leading lights has for the first time taken the brand that started it, Daily Blue, back to the drawing board.

If we want cotton in the next thirty years, we need to support small farmers and their communities. This is not the only reason, but the long-term vision driving the development of direct-to-grower programmes. Their ambition is to bridge the wide gap, a chasm really, between global brands and individual farms.

It is a waterless, non-chemical technology that replicates the varied washing and distressing that the denim industry indulges in.