When Italian designer Roberto Cavalli starts talking about jeans fashions he goes into rapture: “Jeans are my specialty and are probably the key to my success. I was able to transform basic denim into a luxury product – using patterns and designs generated by lasers and crystal applications. For the next season, I propose very light stretch jeans made precious by glitter applications.”

      As one of the pioneers of the precious look, Cavalli relies on textile finishing products that make jeans not only blue, but also fashionable. Thomas Pfisterer, head of the Performance Chemicals for Textiles unit at BASF, states: “Without textile chemicals it would not be possible to create the fashionable jeans that are worn and loved by hundreds of millions of people around the globe. Our developments in the area of textile chemicals allow us to make a contribution to the current five to six fashion cycles each year.”

      Viewed historically, BASF made jeans fashion possible almost right from the beginning. The legendary German emigrant Levi Strauss had his riveted waist overalls patented in 1873 at the time of California ’s great gold rush. Not long after, in 1890, BASF was granted the all-important patent to manufacture the blue synthetic (jeans) dye indigo on the industrial scale. Combined with the hard-wearing cotton fabric imported from the French city Nimes (de nimes = Denim), this added up to a fashion success story unrivalled to the present day.

      The world of jeans fashion owes its vitality to its ability to change constantly and combine individualism with the spirit of the times. Jeans fashions such as bleached, stone- or sand-washed, destroyed, fade-out, used-look, over-dyed, authentic or clean-look are all products of innovative textile finishing – and these are just a few examples. The innovation begins with the treatment of the yarns used to produce the denim fabric.

      The cotton has to be prepared for processing, dyeing with indigo and weaving. Pretreatment products like detergents, sizing agents to make the fabric tear-resistant and smoothing agents for the cotton yarns are used during this phase. Here too, BASF is one of the world’s leading suppliers. The fabrics then have to be dyed, coated or printed – whatever is needed to create the desired effect. Gloss and glitter also present no problem for BASF’s range of textile coating chemicals. The final step is ...

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