Do you ever wonder what sartorial final resting place a red carpet look ends up in? In the closet of the celeb who wore it, perhaps, or maybe straight into the safe haven of the designer’s archive. Then again, it could languish on a sample rack before it ends up in a sale months—or years—later. (It’s not the racks that got smaller, it’s the awards shows.) On the other hand, the look that model and activist Amber Valletta wore to the Green Carpet Fashion Awards last night in Los Angeles—an event hosted by Livia Firth, the Green Carpet founder, along with Zendaya, Cate Blanchett, Helen Hunt, Julianne Moore, Annie Lennox, Brazil’s Minister of Indigenous People Sônia Guajajara, and Ugandan climate justice activist Vanessa Nakate—could have a whole other future.
Valletta’s short Triarchy black tuxedo dress (few rock a tux better than her, as anyone who has ever seen her in YSL will attest) was made from denim by an Italian company called Candiani Denim. The fabric, by virtue of its specially developed stretch agent, called COREVA, can be cut into a million tiny pieces… and then used as fertilizer because it is compostable—the world’s first, in fact. No, really. It’s not so much eat your greens as eat your jeans.
“Technically, yes—my dress could be shredded and used to grow tomatoes,” said Valletta over the phone from LA a couple days before the awards ceremony, adding, with a laugh, “I’m just hoping that I have time to get home and back into my sweats before it gets shredded and used.” That tomato-growing line, though, is no joke. In fact, the narrative is quite straightforward. “Of course, we need to understand the science and data and hard facts,” says Valletta, “but this story is also just so easy, and so charming: Who doesn’t love tomato pasta sauce, and who doesn’t love jeans?”
What happened was this: Alberto Candiani has long been developing more sustainable ways to manufacture denim, and after five years of work found a way to make it—with some degree of stretch—so that the denim can be biodegradable and thus become part of a cycle of circular agriculture. (Most stretch fibers are made of petroleum—clearly not a good thing.) For Candiani, this was a huge step forward. “Denim is cotton—the very first step of its making process is a seed in the soil,” he said. “The future is about connecting fashion with the agricultural industry.”