BOSTON – Footwear brand Converse has partnered with UK-based second-hand retailer Beyond Retro to develop its new Converse Renew Denim collection, which upcycles jeans – otherwise at their end-of-life – into the fabric upper of Converse shoes.
Sourcing its denim from Beyond Retro, which claims to sort more than one million pairs of jeans a month, Converse says it will scale up the footwear range to introduce what it describes “the first upcycled collection of its kind at industrial scale,” this month.
“We are providing the high street customer with a more environmentally sound alternative at a huge scale,” commented Bank & Vogue’s creative director, Steven Bethell. “We hope to continue this work by using our knowledge and access to second hand materials to create more product designs that challenge our ideas of used materials.”
