Your Next Puffer Coat Will Be Filled With Flower Petals, Not Feathers

It’s officially puffer season. New York got its first major snowstorm yesterday, following a weekend of Midwest blizzards (and frustrating holiday flight delays). If you’re committed to shopping sustainably, though, puffer coats are a bit of a conundrum: Traditional goose down often entails animal cruelty (the birds may be plucked alive, or killed exclusively for their feathers), while vegan fill alternatives are typically made of a petroleum-based synthetic, like polyester, which won’t biodegrade and sheds microplastics. Neither option is ideal, so what’s a conscious—and cold—shopper to do?  
 Today, Pangaia, the science-forward basics line that launched last year, is addressing that gray area with its latest release: FLWRDWN, a capsule of puffers filled with natural wildflowers. It’s the rare sustainable solution that’s neither cruel to animals nor to the planet; in addition to being ultrawarm, fluffy, and hypoallergenic, the “flower down” is 100% biodegradable.

“It has the potential to change the entire industry,” Dr. Amanda Parkes, Ph.D., chief innovation officer at Pangaia, explains. “The traditional down industry has so many issues, but the vegan options are all petrochemical-based. That in-between solution hasn’t been addressed yet, and as we scale, it can cross over to so many other products—vests, pillows, comforters, home goods.” For those of us who have grown up wearing down, she insists that the flower fill has “the same thermal properties as down, and the same natural fluffiness, but it comes from waste. And any time we can create a high-tech, bio-based alternative [to an animal product], it’s better than a synthetic.” 
 That’s important to note at a time when using recycled plastic water bottles has become a shortcut for brands trying to join the sustainability conversation. “It’s great to recycle bottles and get them out of the oceans, but the problem with turning them into textiles is that they still give off microplastics [in your laundry],” Parkes explains. “That’s why we try to avoid them in our products, but there are a lot of things that we don’t have a good industry solution for yet.” The FLWRDWN puffer shells are all made of recycled plastic, for instance. “If you use recycled polyester or nylon for garments that aren’t washed often, like shoes or outerwear, that’s okay. But you don’t want it to be in your T-shirts and underwear.”  
 FLWRDWN is arguably Pangaia’s most game-changing solution, following the brand’s quiet release of recycled-cotton sweats, seaweed-fiber T-shirts, and botanical-dyed basics over the past year. Until now, it wasn’t entirely clear who was working at Pangaia (the team is still mostly anonymous), but FLWRDWN is bringing the company further into the spotlight. First and foremost, what sets Pangaia apart from other sustainable and ethical brands is that its mission isn’t to create exclusive, proprietary materials and products; instead, it functions as an open-source platform, working with scientists and innovators around the world to make those solutions available to everyone.

By supporting and investing in the lab in Italy that created flower down, other companies will eventually be able to source it too. “We’re doing the work to get these products to commercialization,” Parkes says. “We work with start-ups knowing there’s a lot of risk, a lot of uncertainty. There’s a lot of work that goes into combining different technologies—with the flower down, there’s a bio-based polymer we developed to hold the petals together, and an aerogel, which is a really high-tech substance. Developing that alone took a long time, and conducting the life cycle assessments and making sure everything was fully biodegradable. We have to go in and make sure all of the chemistries work together, and then the idea is to license [the product], open it up to other companies, and use it across the industry to make change.”  
 Parkes describes Pangaia’s overall philosophy as “high-tech naturalism,” and believes the future of a sustainable fashion industry lies in finding uses for what already exists, from flower petals to agricultural waste. “The parts of a plant that get thrown away, like a banana tree husk or pineapple leaves, are cellulosic, meaning you can make fibers with them,” she says. “The future will be about using those as alternatives to cotton. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with cotton, but we overproduce it in such quantities that we’re wrecking the ground, and conventional cotton is incredibly toxic from the fertilizers and pesticides. So we’re working with companies who are exploring that space.” One is Mango Materials, which is taking methane waste and creating a type of bio-based plastic; another is developing “leather” made of mushrooms; and a third built a machine that extracts pollution from the engines at factories to create black dye. “Our philosophy is really about the conversion of waste and identifying the streams where we can apply technology to make them useful.” 
 Many of those technologies take time—the flower down was in development for 10 years—and are usually expensive at first. The short FLWRDWN puffer is $550, while the longer version is $750 (an investment, but no more expensive than the luxury puffers and parkas you see all over New York). “When you scale, things get cheaper,” says Parkes. “It’s the same way science and drugs and technology work—drugs get cheaper the longer they’re out. Right now, sustainable fashion is expensive because the industry hasn’t hit the crucial point for everything to drop in price yet, but we’ll get there.”

In the immediate future, look out for a major creative collaboration from FLWRDWN in early 2020; in the meantime, shop the first capsule here.