by One can find a stressful, years of hunting. There will be endless failed games and optimism that lead to disappointments. Then one day browse in a shop and see them inappropriately on a stack. You will try them on and know: that’s mine. But why is it so difficult for women to find the perfect jeans?
Anna Foster, the founder of Elv Denim, can explain. “We have accepted a form that was designed as a workwear for a man and tried to fit a woman,” she says. “And actually it doesn’t work. Women’s bodies are much more circular, they have curves, waist and hips that are not necessarily proportional to jeans.”
Sustainable denim
After Foster had worked as a fashion style for 25 years, he founded her brand to solve this problem and another big one. Around five billion jeans are produced every year, and many of them land on landfills within 12 months. According to Levi, it takes about 3,781 liters of water to make a few of its famous 501s, from growing the cotton to dyeing the jeans, which corresponds to showers for five hours.
Foster wanted to create a few jeans that were developed for women’s bodies, but believed that there are already enough denim to walk around. “I am an environmental enthusiast who builds a brand for common sense and innovation,” she says. “The purpose of Elv Denim is to be a nice solution for everything that nobody wants.”
All ELV jeans consist of upcycled pairs that were bought by vintage warehouses or the textile recycling association that would otherwise have gone to the landfill. They are sewn together with a front seam that enables them to be a cylindrist – something that foster says is “essential for a woman’s body”. They contain the seam allowance so that they can easily be inserted and excluded, which makes them a jeans for life. “You can buy these jeans if you are 18 and you can still wear them if they are 80 years old,” smiles Foster.
We meet in the studio of the brand in Stoke Newington – ELV stands for East London Vintage. Everything that produces upcycled materials on the label, from jeans to leather jackets from patchwork and new shirts. The immediately recognizable, composed items of clothing quickly became a denim status symbol in the east (just look around the lane stoves).
During my visit, the team is preparing for the first pop-up from ELV in the center of London: a three-month residence in Great Portland Street, which was opened on April 9 and contains the new collection and the old favorites. In addition to clothing, there will be a program of events, including short film screenings, panel discussions about sustainability, readings and champagne tastings.
At the bottom of the studio, a handful of women work at sewing machines who make changes and put pieces together. In the office on the upper floor, the shirts of jeans and old Ralph Lauren are stacked in stacks, and their candy -colored strips give the feeling of a coastal promenade.
ELV has not only worked his own collections with the Outnet to produce a number of parts from objects last season that were not sold. In 2024 it also designed a capsule collection for Liberty London and converted the silk scarves of Upcycled Liberty Print into unique shirts and skirts. Foster is expanding the business in advice and hopes to advise other brands on the creation of sustainable collections from their textile waste.
Upcycling clothing
She believes that the provisional atmosphere of Etsy has incorrectly gave up a bad name. “All recycling, no matter how high it is, uses chemicals and there is always a toxic performance,” she says. “Upcycling enables a really clever design, a creative design and design with durability because they have to do something better than what they had at all.”
The jeans start at £ 27 and as soon as the materials are covered, everything is produced in East London. The brand works with five local studios and pays them fair wages. “We refuse to compromise a compromise for profit,” says Foster. “Our customers want to have the feeling of buying something with purpose.”
Foster sees Elv a little like a rescue house for abandoned jeans, even though she has her favorites. Wrangler is apparently much better than Levis, although the team tries not to look at the jeans brand that comes to them, but to focus on the quality of the material.
Foster Bête Noire is stretch jeans. “I can’t even start complaining of the stretches of the stretch,” she says, shaking my head. “Stretch is a temporary solution because it loses its shape. And it is also a catastrophic solution for the planet.” Stretch denim is sewn with elastane, a plastic, which means that the jeans are not realizable and difficult to upcycle.
She believes that people who traditionally have difficulty finding jeans who choose stretches well. “It is a myth that if you are a certain size, you cannot wear rigid jeans,” she says. “We have a lot of people, size 14, size 16 and higher that wear our rigid jeans.” Although they have “silhouettes for each individual body”, many women in the office have a certain style called The Freya, a flicker with wide legs that are on their hips.
I remember the sisterhood of traveling trousers, the wonderfully bizarre Rome-Com with America Ferrera and Blake lively over four friends with different sizes, who share a few jeans that all fits perfectly in mysterious way. “We are told all the time,” laughs Foster. “I think Blake Lively has a few things in her life at the moment, but I tried to bring a couple to her.”
While ELV has a couple of “trend” jeans, including a new couple of season with big scrunching-art rainstark, says Foster, trying to concentrate on “timeless and classic” styles. Here, too, it is about encouraging clothing for life, not just for Christmas. “The rest of her outfit can be an allusion to a trend, but her jeans are her constant,” she says.
While Foster has strong feelings in terms of ethics from Denim, it is less pickled in style. Regardless of whether you are bootcut or thin, your ethos is simple: “Wear the jeans with which you feel good.”
