Dutch brand Kings Of Indigo has teamed up with Candiani of Italy to launch a range of fully biodegradable stretch jeans with up to 45% elasticity.

The collection is based on Candiani’s fabrics made from Coreva, a proprietary and patented yarn composed of 96% organic cotton and 4% natural rubber.

“Thanks to this combination, along with our Indigo Juice and Kitotex Vegetal dyeing and finishing technologies which eliminate the usual plastic fixation agents, we have created a never before seen eco-compatible stretch denim fabric that disintegrates in a matter of months,” says Alberto Candiani, the fourth generation head of the denim manufacturer. “These biodegradable fabrics are 100% true indigo and release no microplastics when the jeans are washed, and as a bonus, Kitotex Vegetal also provides antimicrobial properties.”

Every year, he adds, approximately 25 billion garments are sent to landfill or incinerated, with the vast majority made from synthetic non-renewable, petrol-based polymers and elastomers which can take up to a century to decompose. The new denims will decompose in a matter of months.

As part of an ongoing collaboration, in April Kings Of Indigo launched a premium selvedge capsule collection based on Candiani’s Re-Gen fabric that uses no new cotton, eliminating the water and harmful chemicals that would otherwise be used to cultivate the fibre needed to make each pair of jeans.

“Both of these collections sacrifice nothing in terms of comfort, fade and style,” says Kings Of Indigo founder Tony Tonnaer. They are truly denims for life.”

“Our perspective on business is long term,” says Candiani. “For both us and Kings Of Indigo, the end goal is pure circularity. You can only achieve this by building up meaningful collaborations, so currently we’re only sharing this technology with friends. With their feedback we can continue to experiment and push the circularity aspects even further.”

www.candianidenim.it