Giving plastic a Double Life - Pharrell Williams
Back in 2014, Pharrell Williams teamed up with Dutch denim house G-Star RAW to launch the collection RAW for the Oceans. The collaboration brought together Williams’s eco-textile vision and G-Star’s denim legacy — and the result was much more than a fashionable capsule. Their mission: to transform discarded plastic from oceans and beaches into wearable, desirable clothing. In a time when awareness around fast fashion and sustainable practice was still in it’s infancy, this was the purposeful creative we needed.
Sustainable or ‘green’ fashion often gets a bad rap - over-priced, boring, bland and beige. But with the birth of Pharrell x G-Star RAW for the Oceans, sustainable fashion broke through the beige barrier and entered the style stakes. Established in 1989, G-Star continued to prove that it doesn’t follow the crowd and that breaking the narrative by converting waste into wearable, could be and still is, pretty damn cool.
As creative director of Bionic Yarn (the textile company behind the innovation), Pharrell explained that “denim is one of the most cherished fabrics on Earth, and we have created the next generation.” (W Magazine+1) Through the collaboration, clothes such as jeans, T-shirts, sweatshirts, jackets, and caps are woven using Bionic Yarn’s eco-thread — a high-performance yarn spun from recycled plastics retrieved from the ocean.
The first RAW for the Oceans collection debuted at New York Fashion Week 2014 and was released globally shortly after. G-Star committed to integrating Bionic Yarn not only in this capsule but, over time, throughout their entire line of products. More than 10 years have passed and the collection is still available and going strong.
Bionic Yarn: From Waste Plastic to High-Tech Textile
What sets Bionic Yarn apart is the way it transforms plastic waste into functional, stylish fabric. The process begins with plastic bottles — often collected from oceans or shorelines — which are shredded into flakes, then melted and spun into high-tenacity yarn. This recycled yarn is typically blended with natural fibers (like cotton or linen) to give the fabric a softer feel while ensuring durability.
Far from being a one-off experiment, Bionic Yarn has aimed to scale. Early collaborations reportedly recycled around ten tonnes of ocean plastic for the first collection alone. Over time, the ambition was to replace all conventional polyester in G-Star RAW’s collections with Bionic Yarn — moving from capsule-line tokenism toward systemic change.
Pharrell’s involvement isn’t merely symbolic. As Bionic Yarn’s creative director and a strategic partner to G-Star RAW, he helped curate designs, champion the sustainability mission, and drop a star’s shine on what might otherwise have been an obscure textile project.
Why It Matters for Sustainable Fashion
The partnership between Pharrell, Bionic Yarn, and G-Star RAW represented one of the early high-profile attempts to tackle ocean plastic waste via fashion. Now 11 years later, unfortunately it remains an outlier in an otherwise largely-unaltered fashion industry. By upcycling plastic bottles into wearable denim garments, the project illustrated that sustainability need not compromise style or quality. It helped raise awareness about marine pollution and the role the fashion industry can — and should — play in addressing environmental problems.
Although it opened the door for “circular” and “recycled-material” fashion to enter mainstream wardrobes, showing that jeans could carry a deeper story, for many consumers there is still considerable work to be done in understanding and choosing sustainable and ethical fashion.
Pharrell Williams. Credit: foto_di_matti - Wikimedia Commons