Thanks to fashion, people these days are buying brand new clothes that have been designed to look like they’ve been worn for at least several years, but hey, that’s fashion for you. However did you know that the process involved in creating that worn-in look is rather labor intensive and involves a bunch of chemicals?
If you didn’t, now you do, and the good news is that Levi’s wants to make their jeans more ethical by introducing lasers to the process. Dubbed Project FLX, this is an effort by Levi’s to reduce the amount of chemicals used and also reduce the amount of labor required to make a pair of jeans. The use of lasers will help create the worn-in effect, except that instead of taking 18-24 steps to complete a single pair of jeans, it will only take 3 steps.
According to Bart Sights, the company’s VP in technical innovation, “Our first step in the new process is to photograph the jean, and then we take that and illustrate it in a way that the laser can interpret. So what used to happen traditionally 8, 10, 12 minutes with manual applications, we can now execute with the laser in 90 seconds or so.”
Ultimately Levi’s is hoping to achieve its goal of having “zero discharge of hazardous chemicals by 2020”, and will reduce the amount of chemicals used from thousands down to a few dozen during the finishing process. You can check out the video above to see that the end result using the lasers is more or less the same as the methods used before, except faster.