Bringing New Life To Lucky Brand Denim
February 25, 2020 at Santa Monica College Fashion Department. One of the boxes delivered from Lucky Brand with fabric scraps the students can use for their collections. (Karoline Berg / The Corsair)
In 2015, Santa Monica College (SMC) professor Lorrie Ivas started including “chop shops” in the fashion design curriculum. She had her students cut up waste products like old denim fabrics, or tents that are collected from the music festival Coachella, and remake them into fashion pieces. Since then, the project has grown immensely and in the Spring semester of 2019, SMC began cooperating with Lucky Brand.
Lucky Brand is a denim brand based in Los Angeles that, in 2019, started its sustainability program. Allison Charalambous, the senior manager of sustainability and social responsibility at Lucky Brand explained that two years ago they would throw away all of the textile scraps that are now given to SMC and used in the chop shop, because “nobody wanted it and nobody cared where it went anyways, so I started collecting it and calling around to see who would want it.”
According to Charalambous, the students who participated in the chop shop last year used only Lucky Brand fabric scraps and made fashion pieces and collections that were displayed at SMC’s La Mode Fashion Show. “This year we were also able to get a whole bunch of rolls of raw denim - basically unprocessed, uncut, untouched denim,” Charalambous says.
This means the students will have more material to create with. Charalambous says that the chop shop “gives students who go into apparel a view on how much waste is created in the fashion industry.” She was impressed by a lot of the collections last year, and remarked, “the things that the students created were jaw-dropping."
February 25, 2020 at Santa Monica College Fashion department. Pant legs and denim scraps from Lucky Brand that the students can use in the chop shop. (Karoline Berg / The Corsair)
In addition to giving SMC and other fashion schools like Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM) textile scraps, Lucky Brand also donates some of its leftover fabrics. As stated by Charalambous, since February 2019 they have been able to give away 160 boxes of textile scraps that would have previously been thrown away. The fashion industry creates extreme amounts of waste; a Forbes article from 2018, found that “fashion generates 4 percent of the world's waste each year, 92 million tons...” Lucky Brand’s efforts to reduce its environmental footprint is a step in the right direction of sustainability.
This year’s La Mode fashion show is planned for June 12 at 7:00 PM in the SMC Student Services Center, Orientation Hall (S183). However, due to the current circumstances surrounding COVID-19, Ivas says this could change. Some design students have already made the decision to create pieces with Lucky Brand products.
There will be awards given out at the fashion show to the best collections. According to Lucky Brand’s website, last year's first-place winner was Francis John Tejas while second place went to Sarah Moratto. Other awards listed on the website include Notable Recognition for Avant-Garde concept, Treatment of Materials and Usage of Non-Traditional Materials, Notable Recognition for Silhouette and Creative Process, and Notable Recognition for Construction and Usage of Materials.
Some of the fashion design students have already decided they want to participate, and one of the competition rules is that they can only use products from Lucky Brand. Professor Lorrie Ivas presented the project to the students on February 25 and spoke about the importance of sustainability. She made sure to let them know, "It is all about Lucky, it all has to be sustainability and Lucky".
February 25, 2020 at Santa Monica College Fashion Department. One of the boxes delivered from Lucky Brand with fabric scraps the students can use for their collections. (Karoline Berg / The Corsair)
