REVOLUTIONIZING DENIM
WeAr Denim has interviewed Nicolai Marciano, Creative Director of GUESS Jeans, which launched this January and is set to revolutionize the jeans market. Nicolai steps into his family’s footsteps with the aim of creating a more sustainable and approachable
Every generation is different, and legacy in denim is an important factor. How does your vision align with that of your father and uncles, and what is your vision for the future of denim?
My role at the company is to further the legacy of what my family has built over the last 43 years. Being a steward of the archive for the last 10 years, I have a tremendous amount of respect for our history that informs all the creative decisions we make going forward. Especially for GUESS Jeans, which is becoming our DNA and retrospective view of the brand. The biggest alignment of myself, my dad, and my uncles is in product innovation. This was a defining factor of GUESS in the 80s that in large part was the key to the brand’s success; popularizing stone-washed jeans and introducing them to America. Continuing that legacy today means something different, something of the future through a sustainable lens. I think the future of denim is keeping the heritage and texture of its roots while transforming the process and components into something responsibly made. In the context of GUESS Jeans, it’s all about reinterpreting classic aesthetics using new techniques.
What sets GUESS Jeans apart that will make it a global success?
GUESS Jeans is where heritage meets innovation. Our sustainable approach, with top quality and a very competitive price across the entire line, is a big differentiating factor in the market. These ingredients coupled with a marketing strategy and a whole new fleet of GUESS Jeans stores around the world should create a great formula.
What type of distribution do you see and how important is the international multi-brand retailer for you?
Multi-brand is very important for our business. We are opening shop-in-shops in major department stores globally, representing the same spatial design concept as the new fleet of GUESS Jeans stores opening around the world. We are targeting a wide range of customers for the brand.
How did you develop AIRWASH and what are the consumption savings?
We have to thank our partners at Jeanologia for developing the software and the hardware to make GUESS AIRWASH possible. We started development just weeks after the technology had been discovered and went all the way to incorporate it within our whole line.
GUESS AIRWASH saves up to 80% water consumption compared to traditional stone washing processes. It takes about four hours with traditional stone washing to achieve a light wash, this same light wash is accomplished with GUESS AIRWASH in about 45 minutes. We scaled this process to our production facilities like no other brand.
What makes GUESS AIRWASH unique and distinct from other Ozone washes?
What makes our GUESS AIRWASH process different is the special way we use the combination of laser, e-Flow, and ozone, mixed with state-of-theart software to give us a beautiful piece of denim. GUESS AIRWASH removes a great deal of the manual process, a major portion of the water and energy, and the use of ozone helps us get rid of all stones. Instead of just fading down color in a flat way, we have developed a process to recreate the natural highs and lows and the marbling effect that you get from a traditional stone wash. And one of the major innovations is that our ozone machine is able to completely control the humidity that is inside it. This helps create an almost perfect consistency between development and production. The technology is quite new and we are discovering how to further improve results on a weekly basis.