The origin of jeans

For decades, a pair of jeans was the ultimate workwear. They were worn mainly by miners and cowboys because it was practical and durable: jeans were the perfect garment for hard labour because they could endure a lot. Stretch didn’t exist back then, (denim) fabrics were always made from 100% cotton. Making your jeans feel comfortable on the skin was hard work: you had to break them in. Let them conform to your body over time. Some people even wore their jeans while bathing to speed up this process.

The downside of synthetic stretch fibres

Unfortunately, stretch does have some downsides. Stretch denim overall has a shorter lifespan. The stretch fibres can lose their strength and get saggy over time. That is the reason why your stretch denim feels tighter after washing, as it temporarily recovers the stretch. On top of that, synthetic stretch fibres come with the shedding of microfibres. When you wash a garment with synthetic fibres, microfibres get loose and flow away in the water. These microfibres pose a significant problem for the planet, but also for our health. They end up in our food and water and are almost impossible to filter out. That’s why we limit our synthetic fibre usage.

Kuyichi’s stretch considerations

We’d love to go back in time and eradicate stretch fibres, but the reality is that stretch jeans have become the norm in the past decades. Therefore, we have three denim options in our collection: ‘Rigid denim’ without stretch, ‘Low-stretch’ with a maximum of 3% stretch fibres and ‘Comfort stretch’ with higher stretch. As it’s our goal to inspire a big group of people to take—sometimes their first—steps toward sustainable denim, it’s important to us that we can offer a better alternative that suits everybody’s needs. That’s why we do offer stretch denim as well. But we always try to give you the most sustainable option within our knowledge and possibilities.