On any mood board that tries to evoke the casual style of the 1990s there will be an image from a Guess campaign. Claudia Schiffer, Anna Nicole Smith, Drew Barrymore and Carla Bruni were all Guess Girls at one point, starring in the campaigns that defined an era in fashion. Now, Guess is back with a new label and a plan for the future.

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The origins of Guess are fishy, literally. Founded by the brothers Georges, Maurice, Armand, and Paul Marciano, one of their first ever stores was in an old fish shop in the south of France (and apparently the smell never truly left). Guess hit it off in the States when Bloomingdale’s instantly sold out of their first batch of stonewashed denim jeans, a technique that hadn’t quite made it across the Atlantic at the time. Stonewashing is exactly as it sounds, the denim is put into huge drum and tumbled with rocks and water. The result is a pair of jeans that comes pre-distressed, faded and with a couple of scuffs for good measure.

Now, forty years after the Marciano brothers revolutionised the denim market, Paul’s son Nicolai has established Guess Jeans, a new brand under the Guess umbrella. To celebrate, and to show off some of the cutting edge new technologies that Guess Jeans have pioneered, an exhibition called The Next 40 Years of Denim was held in conjunction with the 105th edition of Pitti Immagine Uomo in Florence.

While stonewashing has been Guess’s bread and butter for forty years, the process is phenomenally wasteful. To stonewash 500 pieces of denim, you need about 1250kg of stones and gallons of water, not to mention the immense energy needed to power the drums and the eventual wastewater that is full of toxic chemicals.

Enter Guess Airwash. This new process, which ditches the stones, uses up to 80 percent less water and utilises specially developed drums by Jeanologia to create a product identical to stonewashed jeans but without harm to the environment. The holes, frays, rips, scuffs and fades are all zapped by lasers, a process that really needs to be seen to be believed.

In an unprecedented move, Guess Jeans aren’t planning on keeping any of this new technology a secret. Their hope is to share this technology with all their fellow jeans brands, creating an industry that is more than ready for the next 40 years of denim.

Guess Jeans and Guess Airwash will launch on June 3rd on GuessJeans.com and in a new fleet of Guess Jeans store worldwide.