The anti-denim campaign is strident.
Both for resource usage as well as effluent discharge.
Even though most brands and manufacturers have cleaned up considerably, the campaign continues. What has changed in the last decade (both or the better, and for the worse)? And, where does denim go from here?
Indigo, the king of dye, has been part of human history for over 5,000 years, but it has had its controversies over time. Even though it grows almost everywhere (Africa, America, Asia and, in some lesser form, Europe, where the Indigofera tinctoria does not thrive but woad was grown instead), the most important source of this dye has always been India. The name itself confirms it. Indikon, as it was called by the ancient Greeks, means "Indian", the word later mutated to Indicum (Latin) and finally to Indigo (probably influenced by some Italian dialect), the name that we all use today. For centuries it was being transported from Asia to Europe via the Trans-Saharan caravans; its value was outpacing gold and most luxury items.
When Vasco da Gama opened the way to trade routes between Europe and India, its use skyrocketed, and because of Indian indigo's superior characteristics and availability, European Woad growers started a campaign to ban it, calling it 'the Devil's Dye’. With its ban, value increased further and it dominated in fashion and art, until it was finally legalised again in the 1730s. Around the same time, indigo was also being introduced to the new colonies, i.e., North America, until it became more important than rice and cotton.
The dark side to it was that indigo became a cornerstone of the transatlantic slave trade. In Europe, the China Blue industrial process, developed in 1785, brought its production to local manufacturing. With its increasing popularity, exploitation also grew. The famous Indigo Revolt in 1859 halted indigo cultivation for two years. This, and the end of America's colonial trade with Europe, caused the world indigo trade to collapse. The final straw was the invention of synthetic indigo by Bayer at the end of the 1800s. Natural indigo dyeing began to disappear, industrial production of indigo dyed fabrics boomed. The rest is history.
While nobody knows for sure where or when denim was invented (the few urban legends that circulate do not answer many questions), we know that jeans were first made in the mid-1800s, and by the mid-1950s, denim started its unstoppable transformation from workwear commodity to fashion-must-have. The global consumption of denim for jeans manufacturing exploded, and its popularity does not seem to fade. Over the centuries, people never paid too much attention to the environmental impact of textile manufacturing, and denim was no exception.
However, in the last couple of decades we have seen a rising awareness to what the production of denim and jeans can cause. The famous expose’ of Xinjiang, back in 2013, where one third of world's jeans was made, and the subsequent reaction from the Chinese government that shut down dozens of factories and laundries, raised huge red flags and vast resentment from the public. Was it possible that our beloved jeans were so bad to the environment? The short answer is yes.
