DenimHunt

Christopher Griffin, President of WWDMAGIC Talks Denim

Christopher Griffin, President, WWDMAGIC and SOURCING at MAGIC

After writing about jeans for so many years, I must admit that I reached a point where I thought I knew anything and everything there was to know about denim. There was very little that surprised me and I felt confident in my denim-centric world, oftentimes forgetting that there were other sportswear categories like, you know, knits. Then I interviewed Christopher Griffin, President of WWDMAGIC and Sourcing at MAGIC Tradeshow, and discovered what should have been obvious -I don't know everything.

Without quite being aware of it, as I constructed these questions for Mr. Griffin, I already had his responses in mind. I assumed they would be in lock-step with what I thought I already knew. Therefore, I found myself humbled, and rightly so, when they weren't. Case in point, I always considered denim a leader in innovation when it came to eco-friendly processes, but Mr. Griffin pointed out that the adoption of things like organic cotton and vegetable dyes has been in practice long before the denim industry began its own initiatives. It goes to show, being denim-focused is great but having a more well-rounded, comprehensive view of the textile and apparel industry as a whole is better.

Read the rest of the interview below and if you're attending MAGIC, I'll see you there.

Consumers have an undying love of jeans and it’s been over a decade since denim has been considered a premium product. Why do you think it’s still important for tradeshows like MAGIC to promote denim?

Denim is still a staple item in every man, women, and child’s wardrobe, so we have to have a broad offering of it at MAGIC. We actually don’t promote it separately, unless we have some brand celebrating a milestone of some sort. As it turns out, our SOURCING AT MAGIC show has as its focus – ALL ABOUT DENIM. We’ll have denim factories from all over the world, as well as Cotton Inc*. and Jeanologia, both coming to talk about new eco-friendly denim processing techiniques.

Jeans That Smell Like Fruit are a REAL Thing!

Fragrance Jeans, Salsa, scent, perfume, denim, jeans

Salsa's Fragrance Jeans in Lemon, Strawberry and Orange

Portuguese retailer Salsa has launched a line of jeans called Fragrance Jeans. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that with a name like that, little explanation is needed to explain the pull. As for myself, I can't figure out if this is the next big thing or innovation run amok.

Salsa claims to have created an innovative technology that embeds fruity smelling microcapsules into denim that release a specific scent over time. They don't specify how much time or how many washes it takes before the scent wears off, but they calculate that if you wash your jeans every three days (which I don't) the scent would last almost three months. If you round it out to laundering twice a week over three months, than that's roughly 24 washes.