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We're in business to build a more sustainable world by bringing environmental science into your life in creative ways.

Our recycled fabrics are engineered to fulfill a specific need in your life and are all created from post-consumer plastic bottles.

Trash never looked so good!

Our Signature Fabric

Leggings, Shorts, Sun Suits, Reversible Tops

If 1mm neoprene and luxurious silk made sweet, passionate and consensual love, our signature fabric would be their offspring. Strong yet sultry. Resilient while luxurious, we designed it to keep up with you and live your best amphibian life in and out of the water. 

On land, whether engaging your core in the yoga studio or blissfully doing nothing on the couch, the fabric feels like a soothing cocoon for all your magnificent bits. Made from 88% certified recycled Repreve® RPET and 12% Lycra in North Carolina, we knit the fabric with the perfect amount of stretch and compression. Not too much, not too little. The perfect fit for a gorgeous goddess. 

For more vigorous terrestrial adventures, we mechanically engineer anti-microbial and moisture wicking sorcery into the fiber (no chemical coatings or treatments), so that when you work up a sweat, the fabric pulls moisture and heat away from that bodacious body of yours. It like having a personal air-conditioner, minus the emissions. 

Want to take a swim? Of course you do, why else would you come to a website called Waterlust.com? Whether strapping on a tank of nitrox for a bucket list wreck dive or heading to the beach to soak in some rays and waves, our fabric, like you, is equally stoked in the water. Featuring UPF 50+ UV protection from the all-giving fireball in the sky, the fabric is a sexy skin shield not only from radiation, but all things stinger. We’re looking at you jellyfish, sand fleas, and mosquitos! 

But wait, there’s more

it’s squat test approved. If you know, you know ;-)

Our signature fabric also comes in a black circularity version that has all the same performance features. The difference is that this fabric has been manufactured from a mix of post-consumer bottles AND recycled textiles from our Take-Back Program. Because recycled textiles come in different colors, the resulting recycled fiber ends up looking like 50 shades of brown. To standardize the resulting fabric, the fibers are dyed black during the recycling process.

Our Silk-Weight Fabric

Sun Shirts + Sun Masks

Ever wear a synthetic “performance” shirt in a hot parking lot in the summer and feel like you’re wearing a trash bag with zero breathability. Ya, us too. Or ever worn a cotton, linen, or bamboo shirt that feels amazing when dry, but once it gets wet, it stays wet for the rest of your adventure? Yep, we’ve been there too. 

Our silk weight sun protective fabric was designed over years of prototyping to fill this annoying gap, with specific focus on upper body garments where most heat exchange occurs. The challenge was to engineer a versatile wet/dry fabric that was as thin as possible without losing its UPF 50+ protective ability, and holy sea cow, we were able to get it really thin! Made from 91% certified recycled Repreve® RPET and 9% Lycra in California, the fabric is made from special, teeny tiny recycled fibers and knitted using “the fanciest machine we have” according to Jim at the mill. And Jim is a modest man, so for him to say this is kinda a big deal. But we digress…

Think of it as the working persons silk. Your skin gets goosebumps when you put it on, but stays shielded from the sun all day on the water. You can stand in an asphalt parking lot on a sunny day in Miami in July at noon and still feel cool. Yep, our test team did that too…reluctantly. Dive in it, surf in it, brunch aboard your friends boat that he can’t afford in it. Sleep in it because it’s just so darn comfortable and you had too many mimosas at brunch and forgot to take it off.

Our Woven Fabric

Boardshorts

In the world of boardshorts, there are two political parties: those that like stretch, and those that like strength. The Stretch Party likes thin, stretchy, and comfortable materials that bend with them as they pursue their active lives. Sure, filling your pocket with keys, phone and wallet makes these shorts dangle below the knee like an over taxed elastic, but such sacrifices are well worth the vanity. And who carries a wallet anyway? The Stretches are not bound by such practical matters. 

Then there is The Strength Party. “I’ve had these shorts since 88” could be their campaign slogan. The fabric has zero stretch and is borderline abrasive, but breaks in fine in a couple years….maybe. You can surf in it, slide under you truck to fix that oil leak in it, and pack the pocket full of hardware store receipts and jingling 1/4-20 screws for the damn boat that keeps breaking. Pass them onto your kids as a gift. And while of course they don't actually want your old dirty shorts, they smile and thank you because you raised them right. Strengths are salt of the earth folk, nostalgic of the days when boats were made of wood and men were made of steel, and they choose their shorts accordingly. 

When it comes to boardshort material, we are here to barter a truce between the Stretches and the Strengths, because when it comes to hip huggers, both characteristics matter equally. Our signature boardshort fabric is woven, not knitted, and is made from 88% certified recycled Repreve® RPET and 12% spandex in China. It’s the only fabric we make in Asia because mills in the western hemisphere are behind the 8-ball when it comes to woven fabric technology. But we’re working to fix that. And technology is what was needed to create a fabric that was stretchy and strong, luxurious and long-lasting. No matter which side of the shorts spectrum you fall, you will love this fabric. 

Printing

We're committed to reducing the environmental impact not only of our fabrics, but of the techniques we use to dye them. To dye our unique, vivid prints, we use a process which converts dye molecules directly from a solid to gaseous state, skipping the liquid state in between and causing absolutely no dye to enter our water system (unlike many other dye processes). When heat makes contact with the synthetic fabric (in our case, recycled polyester), the fibers open up to accept the dye like a roasty, toasty, colorful hug which bonds them together permanently and vividly. This process results in minimum dye waste because rather than dying the complete roll of fabric, we use only the dye needed to print the exact pieces being used for the garment.

Besides being environmentally responsible, this printing method, like you ;-), is freakishly resilient! You can swim in a chlorinated pool, leave your gear baking in the sun, wear it and wash it everyday for five years and the colors will still pop like a dawn patrol sunrise! Oh, and if you're like a shark biologist that gets covered in fish guts, sweat and salt on the reg, you can wash it with any detergent, even bleach, and it'll come out just as bright as the day you bought it. Minus the fish guts. So turn that washing machine dial to "heavy soil" and crack a beer, your clothes will be fine.

Organic Cotton

Tees & Tanks

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