DIOR X PARLEY: A CAPSULE COLLECTION BY KIM JONES
Parley and the House of Dior present the Beachwear Capsule made from Parley Ocean Plastic® – a call for change in the fashion industry
Parley and the iconic French fashion house teamed up to create the Beachwear Capsule line, as reinvented by Kim Jones, artistic director of Dior’s men’s collection. With yarns and fabrics created from Parley Ocean Plastic®, the wearable items mark the start of a new alliance and reflect Dior’s desire to move towards a more eco-innovative, sustainable future for fashion together with Parley and our AIR Strategy: Avoid, Intercept, Redesign.
The project was inspired by the ties that unite Dior with nature, stemming from founder Christian Dior’s passion for flowers and gardens, and most notably, the sea: a fascination cultivated from his childhood along the English Channel. Sharing this love and desire to preserve the beauty of the undersea world through eco-innovation, Kim Jones sought to use responsible materials for this capsule collection by collaborating with Parley. A joint research project began in 2019, and has since given life to new yarns and fabrics, designed from Parley Ocean Plastic® – our material created from upcycled marine plastic debris and fishing gear recovered from coastlines and remote islands around the world (e.g., the Maldives, the Dominican Republic and Sri Lanka) and engineered into high performance materials.
“With the latest science highlighting the dire urgency of action, we need transformational change in every sector of society to end the rapidly unfolding impacts on both humans and nature and protect our future on this magical blue planet. Creating this first collection with Dior is a call for the fashion industry to revolutionize its production methods.”
CYRILL GUTSCH — FOUNDER, PARLEY FOR THE OCEANS
The artisans of Dior’s ateliers mastered the technical challenge of incorporating our newly fashioned, recycled alternative to virgin polyester into their couture material production methods. Ocean Plastic® was reworked to create high-quality fabrics, such as a jacquard, a mesh knit and a technical canvas. As Dior describes it: “Marrying desirability with sustainability, these highly singular materials – made ever- more sublime by a palette of blues and ochres – are adorned with iconic patterns, such as the Dior Oblique, timeless bayadères, as well as the Adriatic graphic motif, drawn from the House's archives, showing up on a silky jacquard and chiné for a bewitching three-dimensional effect.” The result is plastic waste transformed into high-fashion innovation, ocean threats redesigned into wearable symbols of change.
Combining comfort with elegance, technicality and refinement, the fabrics dress up a contemporary casual collection of essential, adventure-ready, mix-and-match pieces, including: poplin pants, a thick t-shirt, a polo shirt and a sweater; two jackets in a packable format, allowing them to be folded up to fit in a pouch that borrows its curves from the House’s elemental and iconic Saddle bag; and B23 sneakers incorporating an Adriatic heather fabric, along with biobased plastic soles.
Uniting the promise of a contemporary look and a brighter tomorrow, the collection represents the start of a new alliance that looks to redesign the materials, methods and mindsets of the industry towards a sustainable future for fashion. Additionally, these items support our new “Parley X10” impact program, which guarantees that ten times the equivalent of each product’s carbon and plastic footprint will be intercepted from nature, the development of new materials that can replace plastic long-term is funded, and the use of new, virgin plastic is avoided.
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