How Denim Brand Triarchy is Blazing a Path for Sustainable Luxury

Triarchy is a luxury denim brand that I’ve been admiring for a while because of its dedication to sustainability. It takes approximately 2,900 gallons of water to make one pair of traditional cotton jeans. That’s equivalent to 10,977 1L water bottles. Triarchy set out to change that and have blazed a path with many other innovations along the way.

I caught up with their charismatic and passionate co-founder and creative director, Adam Taubenfligel, to find out more about their journey.

We also eliminated all stretch denim from our line in 2019 as we don’t think you should be wearing plastic. As you can imagine this was a very difficult thing for a denim brand to do.

Even if the stretch is derived from recycled water bottles, which makes a nice story, you are still making new garbage from old garbage, so we opted out of that. Luckily for us we are working with an amazing denim mill that shares our common interests in overhauling the wastefulness of the denim industry so we’re proud to be one of the first to bring to market Candiani’s biodegradable stretch denim, which means stretch denim free of plastics and therefor micro plastics. 

A lot of the footprint our clothes leave behind are done so after we’ve bought them and brought them home, such as micro plastics coming off in the wash and entering water ways so this is our way of eliminating that from our brand. 

You can see from the length of this answer that in order to actually be a sustainable denim brand you have to put a lot of work into it but once you do it becomes the new normal. As a designer I find having a more restricted lens like this to work with sets nice parameters for me. I’ve come to enjoy the limitations of being a sustainable brand because it means Triarchy will have a planet to continue making good jeans on. All we have to do now is get everyone else to follow suit.

I see so many brands with out of touch communications, as if people are literally sitting around a table saying, “hey, young people care about sustainability right? How do we make a brand that speaks to them?”. Unaware of how easy it is to see through such a lack of integrity. It's basically the brand version of the Kendal Jenner Pepsi commercial.

What will really move the needle moving forward is releasing the idea that celebrity will give you longevity. Put your money into 3rd party auditors to expose your materials and your supply chain and in doing so you will build a following of people who are seeking out this kind of meaningful content over who wore it best.

This is why we say “Take a deep breath, sustainability is a mindset." I believe if you give yourself pause to make informed decisions instead of reacting to the impulse spend machine, you will naturally lead a more sustainable existence in all you mindfully choose to do. 

This mindset will ultimately lead you towards purchasing fewer, better things that will last you for a long time and will allow smaller sustainable businesses to become larger sustainable businesses, which will lead to changing the landscape of the industry for the better.