September 03, 2018

As a Design Researcher at G-Star Raw, Fashion Design alum Adriana Galijasevic' '02 is pushing the boundaries of sustainable design. Recently featured in Forbes, G-Star Raw, a leader in the denim industry, has created a jean that is coined as the 'most sustainable jean ever' and the first jean to be certified as Gold Level. Focusing on using organic materials, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified processes and sources for trims, G-Star has created an industry standard.

As Galijasevic states in Forbes, "There needs to be a shift in the mindset of constantly buying, buying, buying—yes. Yet, people like fashion and they will always want to buy more but if you design in a way that you can reuse and remake and you take those used resources to turn them into something else, then it’s ok to be versatile and it’s ok to be abundant. For example, if you use 60 liters of water to make a product but it’s all completely recycled and purified in the process, then abundance is not a problem. But it’s going to take time to build these building blocks for the right materials that you can recapture and reuse again." 

G-Star's jeans are currently being shown until January 2019 in The Victoria and Albert Museum's exhibition Fashioned from Nature. This exhibition is a first in the United Kingdom and focuses on fashion's relationship to nature.