ABOUT THE COLLECTION
This collection is a collaboration between Liz Claiborne, menswear designer Isabella Biagioli, non-profit organization The Ocean Cleanup, and an assortment of clothing brands that are dedicated to cleaning our oceans.
Using a zero-waste approach, Liz Claiborne and Isabella Biagioli curate a collection made from recycled fiber sourced from our world's oceans. The process starts with The Ocean Clean Up. The non-profit will gather and collect the plastic waste floating in our oceans that will be used in text production. The plastic will be delivered to Primaloft and Pangaia where it will be recycled into performance fabric for outerwear and jackets. Seaweed and crushed shells will also be collected and shipped out to Pangaia where it will be spun into yarns for the collection’s knitwear. Our denim will be outsourced to Outerknown’s denim factories in Vietnam and is to be made in LEED-certified factories. Once all the textiles are completed, the fabric will be shipped to our Liz Claiborne factories where Isabella Biagioli’s designs will go into production. The Primaloft and Pangaia tech fabric will be used in the collection’s outerwear pieces, the seaweed yarn will be used in the collection’s knitwear, and the crushed shells, or Chitosante, will be knit into a compression fabric used for the collection’s activewear. Finally, all unused materials, unsold or returned garments in this collection will be sent to The Renewal Workshop. The Renewal system takes discarded apparel and textiles and turns them into Renewed Apparel, upcycled materials, or recycling feedstock.
The big message we want to send through this collection is that what seeps into the ocean will eventually be apart of us. The ad campaign that accompanies this collection is meant to highlight how we treat our world’s oceans versus how we treat ourselves. 60% of the human body is made up of water and 71% of the Earth is covered in water. Why is it okay to pollute 71% of our home if we would not pollute 60% of ourselves? Both of the “looks” featured in the ad are composed of seaweed. Although the two models appear to look different, they are the same.
