In focus

A pair of blue jeans looks simple. The colour feels familiar, even harmless. But the deep blue of denim sits at the end of a long industrial chain, and the risks in that chain are not all carried by the finished garment. Most of them sit upstream: in chemical manufacturing, in dye preparation, in dyehouses, in wastewater streams and in the communities and ecosystems that live with the consequences. That is the first important thing to understand about indigo toxicity. The pro

Indigo is one of the oldest colorants in human history, but it is also a remarkably sophisticated molecule from a chemical point of view. Its enduring importance comes from a rare combination of properties: a strong and characteristic blue-violet color, excellent photostability, low water solubility and a reversible redox chemistry that makes it suitable for vat dyeing. Those same properties explain why indigo became the defining dye of denim and why it remains central to tex

Few materials have travelled as far, culturally and geographically, as denim. Today it is worn everywhere, by almost everyone, but denim began as a hard-wearing fabric valued for one simple reason: it lasted. The fabric itself is generally linked to Europe. Denim is a durable twill-woven cloth with coloured warp threads and white filling threads, and that its name is said to derive from the French phrase serge de Nîmes. The related term “jeans” is commonly associated with Gen