Last week, J Brand released a five-piece collaboration with Kozaburo Akasada, and it might go down as one of the year’s least-likely pairings. J Brand is a 15-year-old, widely recognized Los Angeles denim brand known for skinny jeans; Kozaburo hails from Japan and is one of menswear’s most exciting and unconventional designers. Their common ground is denim—Kozaburo’s own “3-D” flares and selvedge trousers have a cult following—and both brands are committed to sustainability. The J Brand x Kozaburo capsule featured multi-panel jeans made from repurposed scraps, old samples, and vintage denim from J Brand’s archive, and the results were so good, a few styles have already sold out.
The jeans are also chemical-free, which mirrors the sustainable efforts J Brand is making in its main line. Cutting out bleach and reducing its overall water use are central to the company’s goal to become “fully sustainable” by 2020. It’s getting close: Fall 2019 was about 50 percent sustainable—on the women’s side, that is. The men’s collection is apparently already at 100 percent. The disparity can be mostly attributed to the greater assortment of washes for women; J Brand’s VP of global marketing, Mary Peffer, explained that white and off-white jeans are particularly difficult to achieve without bleach, which always requires a significant amount of water. Fall’s ivory denim motorcycle jacket and matching exposed-fly skinnies will still be irresistible to many J Brand fans, but they can at least balance their impact with the label’s newest development: its first-ever unisex jean, a dark-rinse selvedge pair in a straight, easy fit.
