Wrangler inspired one Texas amateur baseball team in Austin to go to bat for sustainability.
The Texas Playboys Baseball Club teamed with Wrangler and Fort Lonesome, known for its custom chain stitching and Western wear, to redesign their 2023 uniforms using reclaimed denim.
Hundreds of old Wrangler chambray shirts were reassembled into jerseys for the team. Evan Voyles, a local sign maker, donated his collection of Wrangler chambray shirts and Wrangler donated some of its upcycled denim to the project to “fill in the holes” and make enough jerseys for the team.
The jerseys were cut and sewn by and also feature custom chain stitching from Fort Lonesome, which has made two other jerseys for the Texas Playboys.
Some of the fabric dates back more than 20 years.
The idea for the project came to be after Texas Playboys founder Jack Sanders and first baseman Robert Sanchez learned about Wrangler Reborn, the brand’s curated collection of vintage and preloved denim featuring items from as early as the 1950s.
The resale collection is part of the brand’s WeCare Wrangler sustainability mission, contributing to circularity within the fashion industry by reselling older denim pieces which may otherwise end up in a landfill.
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“The ball club has a policy of ‘less is more,’ so the goal is to create new uniforms using reclaimed materials—in this case, denim—which we felt aligns perfectly with Wrangler’s roots,” Sanchez said.
In the process, the Texas Playboys and Wrangler found that sandlot baseball and denim had a lot in common.
“Sandlot baseball is about finding or rediscovering the purest form of the game,” Sanchez said. “We are inspired by our experiences as children when something as simple as pallets leaning on each other to create a wall can serve all summer as our imaginary Fenway Park or Wrigley Field.”
He said recycled materials like denim “tell stories through their wear and tear about the real people that used them before us.”
Wrangler gave away one upcycled Texas Playboys Baseball Club jersey to an Instagram winner, one of the nearly 600 commenters on a post promoting the giveaway.