Jeans are a popular fashion item, but at what cost to the planet?
Emma McClendon, assistant professor of fashion studies at St. John’s University, delves into this.
Emma McClendon is Assistant Professor of Fashion Studies at St. John’s University in New York. While Associate Curator at The Museum at FIT from 2011-2020, she curated numerous critically acclaimed fashion history exhibitions including Power Mode: The Force of Fashion (2019), The Body: Fashion and Physique (2017) and Denim: Fashion’s Frontier (2015). She holds an MA Hons. in Art History from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and an MA in the History of Dress from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She is currently completing her PhD at the Bard Graduate Center for decorative arts, design history, and material culture in New York City. Her research focuses on the power dynamics inherent in clothing with a particular interest in body politics, labor, technology, and standardized sizing. Recent publications include Denim: Fashion’s Frontier (Yale, 2016), Power Mode: The Force of Fashion (Skira, 2019), and the forthcoming (Re)Dressing American Fashion: Wear as Witness (Yale, 2025).
Jeans: Universal and Unsustainable
Ten years ago, The Global Denim Project estimated that “on any given day, over half the world’s population is wearing jeans.” This staggering statistic shows no signs of abating. According to recent numbers from Cotton Inc. and the Global Denim Survey, consumers in the United States, China, Germany, and Italy own an average of 10 pairs of jeans, and nearly 60 percent of these same consumers plan to purchase more jeans in the next year. With such a colossal scale of production and consumption globally, a key question is: what is the environmental cost of our universal love of jeans?
I run a class entirely centered on denim, in which my students and I explore the history, materiality, market, and sustainability of denim from cotton farms to landfills. Jeans began as workwear during the nineteenth century. Made from thick cotton denim, jeans developed a reputation as a “sustainable” garment. Jeans don’t need to be washed regularly, they can stand up to decades of hard wear, and their natural cotton fibers are theoretically biodegradable – indeed these attributes made jeans a go-to for the environmentally conscious hippies of the 1960s.
But cotton is a particularly thirsty crop. It requires huge amounts of water to cultivate. And almost every pair of jeans today goes through further steps of industrial stone-washing to soften them before they hit store shelves, generating further water waste and pollution. Making matters worse, many jeans now use a blend of cotton and synthetic stretch fibers. Blended fibers are incredibly complex to recycle and therefore often end up in landfills.
Next time you put on your favorite pair of jeans, remember that they took roughly 1,800 gallons of water to produce.
