Music

Pharrell wants to literally turn garbage into jeans

by Mark Teo

According to multiple reports (OK, more like a single, potentially dubious source), Jesus turned water into wine and bread into fish. Pharell’s no Jesus, of course, but he’s hoping to pull off a similar feat: Namely, he wants to turn the world’s trash into jeans.

According to a press conference held at New York Fashion Week, Pharrell is launching G-Star RAW For the Oceans, a collection using a fabric called Bionic Yarn. The material, as it turns out, will be more salvage, less selvedge—it’s a synthetic fibre made from recycled plastics. In RAW For the Oceans’ case, they’ll be creating denim from plastics pulled from the ocean.

Here’s how Bionic Yarn works, according to its website.

G-Star isn’t the first label to use Bionic Yarn. Burton Snowboards also created a line using the synthetic material last November to rave reviews, and that project, too, was promoted by Pharrell.

“I met Tyson [Toussant], one of the founders of Return Textiles, creator of Bionic Yarn, through a friend—we were talking because I wanted to get involved in a “green” business, and then I saw the product,” Pharrell told Hypebeast. “It was a done deal. The fabric feels fantastic!”

Pharrell also hinted that he’d use the material on his own labels, Ice Cream and Billionaires Boys Club. But while we haven’t heard any news on that front, G Star Raw stepped up to the plate—and they’re the first premium streetwear brand to use the green fabric. (Because no, sorry, Burton doesn’t exactly qualify.)

Here’s the video G-Star released.

“Dear human beings,” he says in the video. “We vacation by the oceans. We live by the oceans. We eat from the oceans. But very few of us think of the oceans beyond what we want from it. The oceans need us now, they’re filling up with plastic and it’s ruining the neighbourhood.”

The collection, according to the video, will be available August 15—presumably, it’ll be a part of G-Star’s fall-winter 2014 collection.

G-Star RAW for the Oceans is a reaction to pollution gone rampant: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which has been estimated to be twice the size of the continental United States (!!!!), is a plastic continent floating around in the expanse between Japan and Hawaii. According to some estimates, plastic constitutes up to 90 per cent of all sea-faring trash, with, on average 46,000 pieces of plastic floating around per square mile. That plastic, meanwhile, takes hundreds of years to break down.

So why not turn it into denim? If the idea of having pants made of trash grosses you out, then we’ll one-up you: Watch the below vid for the run-down on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.