Vogue and Public School Have Teamed Up on Sustainable Tees
In June, Public School’s Dao-Yi Chow and Maxwell Osborne launched Version Tomorrow, an eco-conscious T-shirt project that produces blank tees made of recycled material. To help relaunch the Vogue Shop, the designers have created three limited edition shirts with a potent message: “Waste not want not.”
Chow, Osborne, and Vogue are making this product with the hopes that it will not only spread awareness but also show how high-quality eco materials can be. All of the shirts are made in China from a blend of 60% post-consumer waste cotton and 40% new organic cotton. That material is then dyed using a recycled water filtration system, with the tees cut and sewn in Canada. For their business, Chow and Osborne will sell these tees as blanks, meaning any aspiring designer can buy new tees from Version Tomorrow to screen-print or embellish as they please. “The blank market has become such a big business with the rise of streetwear, but that whole process has been taken for granted. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, so instead of buying blanks that were made from 100% virgin cotton or ones that are irresponsibly produced or sourced, here’s another option,” Chow says. “We’re not saying that this is it; we’re obviously making more clothes, but the purpose is to offer the option to people who are conscious about it.”
All of Version Tomorrow’s tees, including the ones made with Vogue, can be recycled after they’ve worn out their stays in shoppers’ closets. “Each tee can be broken down and put back into the supply chain for us to use as raw materials in the future,” Chow explains. “So we are trying to figure out how we can trace the product and be able to collect the product to be able to use as raw materials for the next batch.” That’s good news for the environment, though if we can say so, the messaging on our Vogue tee isn’t going to go out of style anytime soon.
Originally Appeared on Vogue
