G-Star RAW's More or Less exhibition at Milan Design Week 2023 transformed recycled denim into monumental design objects, created with The Family Amsterdam and
G-Star RAW Turns Denim Waste Into Design at Milan Design Week
G-Star RAW's More or Less campaign is a 2023 exhibition and creative campaign that transformed recycled denim waste into monumental design objects, unveiled at Milan Design Week in April 2023 through a collaboration between G-Star RAW, creative agency The Family Amsterdam, and Dutch designer Maarten Baas.
The campaign launched in The Netherlands in April 2023, with the public exhibition running from 18 to 23 April at Chiesa San Paolo Converso, a 16th-century church located at Piazza Sant'Eufemia 1 in Milan, according to g-star.com and dezeen.com. The venue, open daily from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., provided a historically charged backdrop for a show explicitly concerned with excess and restraint. The title More or Less names the central tension the campaign explores: the duality between the consumer desire for more and the environmental imperative for less.
The exhibition presented two headline works. The first is a triptych of cabinets shaped in the silhouette of a pair of jeans, each piece simultaneously referencing denim as subject and functioning as storage furniture for denim garments. The second is a fifteen-metre-long private jet clad in recycled denim, as reported by dezeen.com and interiordesign.net — a deliberately provocative symbol of hyper-consumption rendered in the very material it critiques. Both works were constructed from a textile board material derived from recycled G-Star jeans, developed in partnership with Danish textile innovators Really, part of the Kvadrat group. The raw material was sourced through G-Star's established Return Your Denim programme, which invites customers at G-Star stores across Europe to return worn garments for recycling. Visitors attending the Milan exhibition were additionally invited to bring their own worn clothing to be screen-printed on-site with the campaign's signature message, More or Less, deepening participatory engagement with the brand's sustainability argument. The campaign earns a Clapboard Score of 79 out of 100.
G-Star RAW positions More or Less at the intersection of denim culture and circular design thinking. The campaign does not ask consumers to buy less outright; it proposes a revaluation of what already exists, channelling the brand's long-standing RAW identity — defined by material experimentation and manufacturing transparency — into a sustainability narrative with tangible physical proof.
The strategic rationale is grounded in the conditions of the premium denim market. The global premium denim segment is estimated at approximately 5.73 billion US dollars with projected growth of 5.5 percent through 2030, according to proficientmarketinsights.com, expanding faster than the broader jeans category. In The Netherlands, where G-Star RAW is headquartered and where the campaign was formally published, the brand occupies a prominent position in the domestic apparel market, competing directly with fellow premium denim labels such as Levi's and G-III-owned brands that have invested heavily in sustainability communications of their own. The competitive pressure to demonstrate environmental credibility, rather than merely claim it, is acute across the European premium apparel sector.
The choice to stage the campaign at Milan Design Week rather than a fashion week reflects a deliberate category boundary crossing. Design Week attracts an audience predisposed to material innovation and critical thinking about production and consumption, audiences less likely to interpret a fifteen-metre denim private jet as straightforward product advertising and more likely to engage with its contradictions. As Maarten Baas stated, as reported by Archipanic in April 2023, each year in Milan he enjoys the tragicomic dialogue between green design and mass consumption — a framing that acknowledges the inherent irony in luxury sustainability gestures and uses that irony as creative fuel rather than a liability. The Return Your Denim programme, which supplied the raw recycled material for the exhibition objects, also functions as a live proof point: the works are not hypothetical; they are made from jeans collected in G-Star stores across Europe.
Maarten Baas leads the creative execution of More or Less as designer and artist. G-Star RAW and The Family Amsterdam approached Baas specifically because of his established reputation for work that surprises and provokes in equal measure; as noted by g-star.com, he is regarded as one of the most important designers of the 21st century, with a track record for intriguing the public with unexpected material and conceptual choices.
The Family Amsterdam was responsible for the overarching creative concept of the cabinet triptych and for all campaign creative output, including the film and imagery produced to extend the exhibition's reach beyond Milan. The agency's brief to Baas was precise: create a series of art and design pieces from a new textile board material derived from recycled denim, a material that did not conventionally exist in furniture production before this project.
The textile board itself represents a significant production innovation. Developed by Really, the textile recycling arm of Danish design company Kvadrat, the board material is produced from post-consumer G-Star jeans collected via the Return Your Denim programme. The resulting substrate retains visual and tactile properties that signal its denim origin while achieving structural integrity sufficient for cabinet construction and, in the case of the private jet, large-scale surface cladding. The cabinet triptych is explicitly playful in its formal logic: objects shaped like jeans, made from jeans, designed to store jeans. The gesture is self-referential without being closed — visitors can see their own consumption habits reflected in the furniture's form. The fifteen-metre jet operates on a different register, its scale ensuring that the private jet's conventional associations with excess are impossible to ignore even as the denim surface complicates those associations. As Baas stated, as reported by Twyg in July 2023, the project aims to help regulate hyper-consumption by showing consumers how to make something from denim they no longer want to wear.
No verified third-party performance data for the More or Less campaign — including attendance figures, earned media reach, or measurable shifts in Return Your Denim programme participation — is publicly available at the time of writing.
What can be assessed structurally is the campaign's effectiveness as a communications instrument. The choice of Chiesa San Paolo Converso as venue granted the exhibition immediate editorial credibility; dezeen.com and interiordesign.net both covered the show, placing the campaign in front of architecture and design audiences who do not typically encounter denim brand communications. The fifteen-metre private jet functions as an inherently shareable object — its scale and incongruity make it a reliable generator of organic photography and social documentation. The participatory screen-printing activation extended dwell time and created personalised take-home artefacts for attendees, increasing the likelihood of secondary social amplification beyond the exhibition period.
Rob van Vliet, speaking on behalf of G-Star RAW and as cited by g-star.com, stated that the brand believes there is no limit to what denim can do — a positioning statement the exhibition substantiates with physical evidence rather than advertising claim. The collaboration with Really and Kvadrat, organisations with established credibility in materials innovation, lends independent verification to the brand's sustainability process. The campaign was formally published in The Netherlands in April 2023 and represents the most ambitious single exhibition the brand has mounted under its RAW creative platform, extending a lineage of material-led storytelling that includes the What Is RAW? campaign launched in September 2016, as documented by highsnobiety.com. Clapboard scores More or Less at 79 out of 100, recognising its creative ambition, strategic coherence, and cultural positioning while noting the absence of publicly verified audience impact metrics.
More or Less is a 2023 exhibition campaign by G-Star RAW created with The Family Amsterdam and designer Maarten Baas. It debuted at Milan Design Week in April 2023, presenting recycled denim transformed into a fifteen-metre private jet and a triptych of jean-shaped cabinets, exploring the tension between consumer desire and environmental necessity.
The More or Less exhibition ran from 18 to 23 April 2023 at Chiesa San Paolo Converso in Milan, during Milan Design Week. The venue, a 16th-century church, was open daily from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., as reported by dezeen.com and g-star.com, and was accessible to the general public throughout its run.
Both the cabinet triptych and the fifteen-metre private jet were made from textile board derived from recycled G-Star jeans. The material was developed by Really, part of Danish design company Kvadrat, using jeans collected from G-Star stores across Europe through the brand's Return Your Denim programme, as documented by g-star.com and dezeen.com.
Maarten Baas designed the cabinet triptych and the private jet installation. G-Star RAW and The Family Amsterdam approached Baas because of his reputation for surprising and intriguing audiences with unexpected materials. As reported by g-star.com, Baas is regarded as one of the most important designers of the 21st century.
The Family Amsterdam created the overarching creative concept for the cabinet triptych and produced all campaign creative output, including the film and imagery. The Amsterdam-based agency also developed the brief presented to Maarten Baas, directing the project toward recycled denim textile board as its core material, according to g-star.com and clapboard.com.
G-Star RAW's More or Less campaign receives a Clapboard Score of 79 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strong creative ambition, strategic coherence, and cultural positioning at Milan Design Week, while accounting for the absence of publicly verified audience impact or performance metrics for the 2023 exhibition.
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