While denim remains a primary component of global fashion at every price point, don’t let its ubiquity and casual vibe fool you. According to environmental and workplace safety experts, denim conceals behind its iconic blue fabric a host of toxic chemical pollutants and processes, as well as gross water overuse, all of which degrade the environment and put workers and communities at risk.

That’s denim as it’s been produced over the past several hundred years.

However, the past decade or so has witnessed a surge in “responsible denim” that echoes other industries’ shifts toward safer, more circular products that meet new stakeholder expectations, and concern on the part of consumers, as well as new regulations that have followed.

The Taubenfligel siblings — Mark, Adam, and Ania — exemplify this paradigm shift. They started their family company, Triarchy, in 2011 as a direct-to-consumer women’s jeans brand. The idea was to leverage their skillsets in design, production, and marketing to produce something genuinely new and deeply responsible to the crowded denim category.

Hopscotching in Jeans

“I always say that I never pursued denim,” says Adam Taubenfligel, Creative Director and Responsibility Lead. “It pursued me. I randomly happened to get an opportunity to work with a denim manufacturer in Italy, right out of university. [It was] the art of denim on the factory floor. I put a collection together for them. But they lost all their factories in the financial crisis. And I was left holding a whole set of samples and nothing to do with them. I came back to North America, convinced my brother and sister to start a brand with me. And we started growing it.”

“At the same time,” Adam recounts, “I was working for a company in mainland China designing a denim line for them and using that money to finance Triarchy. These two parallel tracks were running, where I was working for a much bigger organization, and then trying to turn Triarchy into a bigger organization. But then I started seeing what a bigger organization in denim looks like. And it was not very pretty. I couldn’t understand the ambition to occupy factories like this and to create an output like this. Was this the ambition? Building a brand, consuming, and ejecting more junk and garbage into the world? Something is very wrong with this growth structure.”

For example, according to the Taubenfligel triad, “we noticed the incredible amount of water waste and chemical harm that the denim manufacturing industry was having on the planet.” In fact, Adam declares that “Denim is the worst offender when it comes to unnecessary water waste in the fashion industry.”

“Instead of turning a blind eye,” says Adam, “we checked our egos and stopped production, taking the brand offline in 2016 — to find a different way, a better way, to make jeans.”

The family wanted to lead “not just a denim brand, but a vehicle to educate consumers on mindful consumption,” says Adam. “Responsibly made, with sustainability and ethical manufacturing in mind.”

The company would not be reborn until 2018, after an intense period of R&D, under the philosophy of “less is more,” says Adam. That means less water, less chemical pollution, less carbon, and even less product.

Adam describes this process as “‘hopscotching’ from one [technology, one laundering process, one partner] to another until the universe of options started to settle on a group of people that were really doing it right and doing it better. And that just became the ecosystem that we’re still pretty much in.”

Refusing to Stretch

“And it was those first few years that were a huge eye opener,” Adam shares. “We focused a lot on water reduction, chemical reduction, and making sure that the things we were doing were as clean as humanly possible. And there’s a great expense to that. And that was a really big learning curve with buyers, because they love that story, but they hate the price point, which is still the reality. And so we have to keep telling them, you know, we’re doing our best. We’ve managed to bring [costs] down quite a lot in the last year.”

After minimizing toxins, water, and cost, it was time to look at plastic as part of Triarchy’s overall commitment to zero carbon.

Wait, there are plastics in jeans? In the stretch kind, typically, yes.

“We were a women’s denim brand that didn’t have stretch denim,” says Adam. “Well, I refused to use plastic stretch because I refused to just be selling future garbage in the shape of plastic pants. This makes no sense.”

“A couple of years of going to [fabric sources in] Italy, and many conversations about alternatives [to plastic] that might exist and the realities of making them feasible, led to the trial and error of plastic-free stretch denim. What materials could be used in place of crude oil-based plastics?”

“Well, rubber was the natural selection — literally. And that took a couple of years to get past, only a jagging quality. We eventually turned it into something more palatable.”

“And then we brought it to market, the world’s first plastic-free stretch denim … Natural rubber stretch means jeans will biodegrade in two years or less at End of Life, instead of the industry standard 200-plus years for plastic-based stretch materials.”

The “More” in Less is More

Adam’s honesty about how challenging a small company’s sustainability journey can be sums up the transparency behind Triarchy’s success. At every step of the process, from sourcing to sales, more transparency translates to more trust. Through a partnership with Renoon, a embedded QR code shares the garment’s specific consumption details outlining its responsible manufacturing practices, wash processes, and carbon offset project verifications, where applicable.

Triarchy Materiality

• certified carbon neutral
• certified organic cotton
• recycled cotton
• natural fibers
• chem-free dyes
• TENCEL™ & REFIBRA™ sustainable fabric technologies developed by the Austrian sustainable fiber company Lenzing, incorporating wood pulp & recycled cotton scraps.

Does such transparency — and the sustainable processes underpinning it — come with a cost? Adam is truthful as ever: “Sometimes the economic realities of the world force you to make decisions you don’t want to have to make. And that sucks. But for me, I refuse to compromise on the integrity of our brand. And there have been many times when I could have just been like, let’s just make this easier. Let’s make this cheaper. But I somehow continue not to do that. Sometimes, to the detriment of the life of the business.”

“But I just really believe that the good must prevail. It must. I’ve had many conversations with colleagues and peers to that effect. And, you know, without that core belief, there is no hope.”

“Whereas the reality is, if we all just had fewer, better things and operated our consumption models from a place of mindfulness, we would have closets full of things we wear — and left would be so much more.”