Sustainable fashion designer Mara Hoffman debuted a dress made from Circ® Lyocell, a filament lyocell made from fifty percent recycled textile waste, on October 18th, 2023. In what has been dubbed “The Dress that Changes Everything,” designer Mara Hoffman has teamed up with Circ, a fashion technology company that turns polycotton textile waste into new fibres, to create the first-ever high-end garment made from Circ Lyocell. The designer also uses the dress to announce an ongoing partnership, saying that she will use only Circ Lyocell in her future collections instead of virgin Lyocell within the next three years.
Mara Hoffman, a pioneer in eco-friendly and socially conscious fashion, replaced silk with Lyocell before anyone else in the high-end industry. This was a vast improvement, but only one of many necessary ones because the main ingredient in conventional Lyocell is tree wood pulp. To further the company’s dedication to sustainable materials and Hoffman’s pursuit of eco-conscious materials, she opted to use a regenerated version of the yarn, which is made from textile waste that would have otherwise been sent to a landfill or burned.
Each of the 35 dresses in this capsule collection, which features Mara Hoffman’s signature poppy color and strappy silhouette, is numbered and has collector significance. All of the dresses were made in the designer’s hometown of New York, and they can be purchased at the Mara Hoffman store in Soho. Avery Dennison, a materials science and digital identification solutions company and investor in Circ, created a custom label with a note from Hoffman that was sewn into the garment. The dress’s cutting scraps are used to develop the Digital Care Label, which is powered by the atma.io-connected product cloud and includes a QR code that can be scanned to reveal information about the dress’s production process and environmental impact. Mara Hoffman’s Digital Care Label requests that customers who have worn their dresses for a long time bring them back to the brand’s retail store, where they will be collected and sent on to Circ for recycling.
According to Mara Hoffman, the company’s founder and creative director, “In 2015, we committed to making sustainability our framework and part of that journey has been to connect with like-minded people and organizations. Separating polycotton blended textile waste and recovering cellulosic and synthetic fibers is only possible with Circ’s cutting-edge recycling technology. Mara Hoffman and Circ have developed a garment using this technology; it is constructed from Lyocell, which is fifty percent cellulosic pulp derived from recycled polycotton textile waste and fifty percent cellulosic pulp certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.
