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- Girlfriend Collective is a women's athletic wear startup known for giving away $60 leggings for free over the internet and using 25 recycled water bottles to make each one.
- Those leggings are my all-time favorite, most flattering pair.
- Girlfriend Collective recently launched tops, and they're just as great: breathable, flattering, and relatively accessible at $28-$38.
- Each shirt in the collection saves 682 gallons of water compared to cotton.
- To offset any water Girlfriend Collective uses, the company is donating 10% of net profits to Charity Water.
A few years ago, a company called Girlfriend Collective was generating a lot of Facebook buzz by offering anyone who could pay for shipping a free pair of luxury leggings.
So, like any cash-strapped college kid in the age of Athleisure, I gave in and paid $20 for shipping. Two years and over 20 pairs of leggings later, that 'free' pair is still my all-time favorite. They're high-waisted, slightly compressive, pill-resistant, and made from 25 recycled water bottles. Their costs have evened out in the years since, and you can now get a pair exactly like mine for $68 with $7 shipping.
Recently, Girlfriend Collective launched their first-ever collection of shirts— and, after trying them, I can say they've inherited much of what makes the startup's leggings so noteworthy: easy wearability, intuitively flattering designs and colors, and an eco-friendly production.
The tops come in a variety of colors and cuts (a ballet-inspired wrap, two long and short tanks, a scoop-neck tee, and a crop tee) and range in price from $28 to $38. The line is breathable, hypoallergenic, and versatile.
The Cupro Collection is made from the eponymous material "Cupro," a fabric made from cotton linter — a super soft fiber that sticks to cotton seeds and is usually either down-cycled or dumped into landfills. Cupro is soft and silky, commonly drawing comparisons to rayon and silk. I nnovative companies with an emphasis on sustainability like Girlfriend Collective are using it to make unusually luxe-feeling clothes from what is essentially the cotton industry’s waste.
Each Girlfriend Collective Cupro top saves 682 gallons of water compared to cotton, and the company is donating 10% of net profits to Charity Water to offset any water they do use.
Each Cupro piece is unique, with the occasional irregularities and idiosyncrasies that come from using a surplus material. Cupro yarn is made in a zero-waste, zero-emission facility in Japan, and then the top itself is constructed in Hanoi, Vietnam, at the company’s SA8000 certified factory, which doesn’t allow forced or child labor, mandates fair working hours and safe conditions, pays living wages, and allows workers to unionize. You can read more on it here.
In person, the Cupro material is ultra-fine, lightweight, slightly sheer, and extremely soft — the kind of material that feels great to work up a sweat in since it lends coverage but feels “barely there” when you need it to. It’s lightweight but drapes more emphatically than cotton — much more similar to a silk. But, like a cotton, the material breathes easily and regulates body temperature well.
I am perpetually overheating in workout classes. Like my ancestors before me, my body seems to operate on a rubric skewed for the climate of the British Isles — the damper, windier, and rockier, the better. Put me into a hot yoga class on the seventh floor with 30 other people and you will witness me melt like a candle. But since most of my hobbies include physical activity, my life story also parallels one long odyssey to find breathable, flattering, comfortable exercise gear.
For me, these Girlfriend Collective t-shirts and tanks are an unusually great fit for working out — they breathe, don’t feel tight or obstructive, and dry quickly. They’re sheer (I own the light blue, it could be more opaque for darker colors), but not so sheer that I wouldn’t wear them as streetwear on hot days, too. They provide more coverage than wearing only a sports bra to a class, but the Cupro tops are ultimately forgettable in the heat of the moment. And, lastly, they come in great colors — a pretty light blue, dusty rose, smokey charcoal, and a bright cherry red. They look good, feel good, and you can feel good about buying them. For me, that’s enough to keep me coming back.
Admittedly, Girlfriend Collective inventory can be low. With sustainable materials and factories and a company that's very much still a startup, that’s bound to happen. But when you find a top or leggings in your size and you’re concerned about their availability later, my advice would be to act quickly. There’s no guarantee they’ll be in stock later, and I’ve ended up waiting far longer than I would have liked for a restock.
If you're looking for tanks, tees, and ballet wraps that you can feel good working out in and feel good buying, then you should definitely be giving Girlfriend Collective's breathable Cupro collection a look. Colors are flattering, designs are versatile, and the material breathes well enough to feel like it's not there during the 2-minute plank when you wish it wasn't. For that and saving 682 gallons of water per top, I'll happily come back for more.