Fashionably Conscious: PLAYBACK Pays It Forward

Some may consider Al Gore the ultimate environmental crusader. His alarming 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth brought to light the perilous state of our planet, influencing politics, pop culture and setting in motion a movement that has made our world a little bit greener. Among those who were forever changed by Gore’s distressing cinematic essay was DUMBO-based designer Adam Siskind. The Tufts alum and textile engineer realized the recycled yarn he had been using for almost a decade in his clothing business was perhaps not the most sustainable and environmentally friendly material in clothing manufacturing to date.

PLAYBACK, Siskind’s newest clothing company, makes super-soft T-shirts and sweatshirts from entirely recyclable materials through their own patent-pending process. Many green products are associated with uncomfortable fabrics and sometimes-unflattering cardboard-like textures. But with PLAYBACK, this is not the case. Creating their own fabrics by reusing cutting floor scraps and dying T-shirts with the extracted color from crushed recycled plastic bottles, the small and conceptual company has revolutionized the look and feel of eco-apparel.

One of their most original techniques is using the preexisting color of plastic bottles to dye their fabrics, eliminating the most harmful product used in clothing production –- the chemical dye. Their “Beer Bottle Brown” and “Mountain Dew Green” T-shirts are baptized after the unique colors from the recycled bottles used in the tinting process. The brand's sweatshirts are entirely made from recycled cotton scraps and pre-colored yarn, eliminating the use of extra cotton growth which means more land and water will remain intact and untouched.

PICTURED: PLAYBACK T-shirts in Water Cooler Blue, Mountain Dew Green and Beer Bottle Brown. For more information please visit www.playbackclothing.com.