‘Designing to disappear’: The story behind Templa’s first biodegradable jacket

During the height of the sales season at Paris Fashion Week, Anati Rakocz, a founding partner at luxury outdoor brand Templa, grows suspicious of the words used in the showroom. She questions the common practice of saying ‘product’ when describing a rigorously engineered piece of performance apparel that has taken years to develop. Decades of know-how. The shorthand of ‘sustainable’, ‘organic’ or ‘circular’ to defend the manufacturing of new things.

‘The moment that you make a new garment, you're not sustainable because you turned the light on in the studio. You used water to wash the fabric that you likely had shipped from far away,’ she says. ‘We're not coming out with that statement.’

‘Designing to disappear’: Templa’s biodegradable jacket

‘What we're doing is trying to improve and do better and make better choices – within the limitation of what fashion actually stands for.’ A collaboration she has brokered with Allied Feather + Down and Active Apparel Group has reached fruition with a minimalist jacket that will completely disappear after five years if buried in the ground.

It is 99 per cent biodegradable and made without compromise: ‘not on the hand feel, not on the down inside out, not on the seams, not on the zippers, not the volume, the attitude, the swagger, the silhouette. The fashion part of it and the technical part of it is as it should be,’ Rakocz says of the ‘Future Now: Designing to Disappear’ jacket, which won the ISPO Award 2024.

Templa sits within a transdisciplinary space where the Alpine, the outdoor and the street converge. It is conscious of the literal notion of the seasons, as much as the manufactured ones. This is what intrigued Matthew Betcher, Marketing Director at Allied Feather + Down, an ‘ingredient brand’ to a range of manufacturers. He spearheaded a programme that looked at designing for the future.

‘We developed centres for our partners to recycle their used garments, which allows for another level of circularity. What we found is that so often these brands are just pushing sustainability down the line. They're designing and manufacturing these garments and then sending it to people like us saying, “Okay, here you go, recycle it please…”. That’s fine, it's easy enough to recycle the down, but what we're left with is a massive amount of textile waste,’ he says.

AAG has been working for approximately five years on the development of the textiles and the trims. Every snap and zipper are biodegradable. ‘We were built as an insulation company working directly with the farmers, so when we do things like audit our supply chains, we're not just looking at animal welfare, we're looking at how we can improve the lives of the farmers. We have control of every part of the process and sourcing that's been 40 years in the making,’ Betcher says. ‘Sustainability no longer has to compromise fashion or performance. It doesn't have to look like Patagonia.’

This is only the second collaboration Templa has chosen to work on after a buzzy capsule with Raf Simons was released in 2019. One of the biggest challenges is how this comes to market. It requires somebody to take a risk, somebody willing to reduce their margins. This collaboration, which started with an email in April 2024, is also about renegotiating how we look at commercial growth.

Betcher says: ‘We want to see this type of product as the norm. These materials have been around but nobody has actually assembled them in this way. We’re at an interesting crux, here’s the jacket, great, but we also need to rethink how we sell things too. We need to start designing for the end of life. It’s a harder story to tell. It might cost more money but that's the responsibility we all have to change our mythologies. Incremental changes are explosive.’

The ‘Designing to Disappear’ jacket is set to be released in September 2025.

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