The Festival of Natural Fibres 2022. Part 3.

What are regenerative economies when it comes to textiles and fashion, particularly with natural fibres? And what does a seven-year long process into making a nettle dress look like?

May 23, 2023

It’s aims were to create a welcoming space for all those enthusiastic, entranced, or simply curious about natural fibres and brought together a community of farmers, researchers, designers, makers, activists and entrepreneurs to demonstrate and discuss the emerging conversations and technologies in the space.

Each day of the festival focussed on a specific aspect of natural fibres; day one was regarding the value chain - the growing, processing, making and designing, and day two regarded the wider systemic issues, revolving mostly around regenerative economies.

For the purpose of such a lot of information, I’ve split the retelling into a few parts: part one is the growing part of the value chain, part two is the processing part of the value chain, including a tidbit on my attempt at charkha spinning, and a snippet from the making and designing panel, and then part three is on regenerative economies, which includes some reflection on Dylan Howitt’s film about Allan Brown’s work The Nettle Dress.

This is part three, looking at how natural fibres can contribute to regenerative economies.

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Regenerative economies.

The panel session for day two was titled Regenerative Fibres and New Economics. Moderated by Rachel Sheila Kan, founder of The Ecosystem Incubator, “a collaboration of micro-players in sustainable fashion that come together to work as one to build towards a future economy”. Panellists included Bel Jacobs (writer, speaker and activist with a focus on animal rights, the climate emergency and the toxic fashion system), Vanessa Barker (regenerative cotton plant-based underwear brand Bedstraw & Madder), Ashna Patel (Khadi London) and Kishore Shah (co-founder and director of Khadi London).

Introductions.

The panel introduced what ‘regenerative economies’ meant to the panellists as a term, and why they are working on improving the situation for farmers or educating citizens.

Bel said she had felt the resistance to degrowth, which is necessary in order to slow extraction and increase regeneration.

Ashna had taken a sustainable design journey through India, observing and researching the decentralised fibre industry there.

Kishore established Khadi London after returning to Gandhi and witnessing a khadi revolution in London, yet being disappointed that it was all terms and no meat - the khadi he saw wasn’t real khadi - so wanted to build a charity that would educate.

Vanessa is co-founder of Bedstraw & Madder, a brand that have support from Raddis® and Oshadi to access regenerative cotton for their underwear products. They had worked to remove the harmful bleaching process to make a cleaner, healthier fibre and then one year planting regenerative cotton, and one year experimenting with red dye.

Panellists on day one holding up a banner that says, “In a gentle way you can shake the world.“ [Credit: The Festival of Natural Fibres].

Challenges with regeneration.

The conversation started with a look at the limitations of regenerative cotton agriculture to create a strong quality fibre and fabric. Vanessa mentioned that rain-fed cotton produces a short staple fibre (short in length) and so when spun, isn’t as tensile as a long staple, meaning it can’t produce the tightest weave - which is expected of for most products in fashion and homewares. With scaling from 1 acre (which they currently have access to for research) to 100 acres, perhaps it would be possible to put effort into developing a tighter yarn and fabric.

Additionally, there are high minimum order quantities (MOQs) for each step of the chain, along with a desire for a fast pace. However, for a decentralised fabric such as the handspun and handwoven khadi, the education about lead time and quality is misunderstood, so Kishore suggests that there should be a khadi specific standard that ensures brands recognise in reality the time-consuming product they are purchasing. Apparently, luxury brands are buying plots of land in India so that they have immediate access to a crop, but the chain isn’t set up to work like this, with raw cotton being shipped to the gin before being handled by anyone else, including the khadi weavers.

With this model of brands owning land, the farmers become labourers rather than landworkers. If the brand then walks away, the farmer has no stability. Regenerative systems such as those operated by Raddis or Oshadi help farmers retain power. Generally the issue is that brands will come in and say what they want without understanding the wider chain or system, as when they drive prices down without recognising the other players. So in building regenerative fibre systems, there needs to be the inclusion of voices from those of the land.

The overall challenge was noted as being degrowth, but in the Global North only. According to Kate Fletcher (in the Earth Logic Action Plan, I think) she recommends we need a 75-95% drop in consumption, but perhaps only a 60% drop if we already remove synthetics. This suggests that natural fibres could still have a beneficial place in a system that works towards degrowth.

Making it regenerative for people.

In the current agricultural system, farmers aren’t contracted and so really don’t have any ties - apart from if we’re looking at conventional cotton where there is debt to agrochemical corporations, such as Monsanto. So really, farmers can walk if the situation doesn’t suit them. Most conversations revolving around farmers though shows that this is their livelihood, their lifeline, and so why would they want to shift? For most rural places, farming is one of the only ways to support a family. A shift to a regenerative farming system needs to ultimately benefit the farmers first, otherwise the system can’t be upheld.

Unfortunately there was no mention here of food security, only about the growing of fibres. To me, we can’t talk about fibre security if we’re not talking about food security - and vice versa. So at question time, I asked what the panellists’ views are on the interconnectedness of food and fibre; having spoken to Raddis Cotton previously, along with the other half of Bedstraw & Madder, Primrose Matheson, former owner of Primrose’s Kitchen organic cereals, I anticipated certain responses from them. Vanessa for Bedstraw & Madder responded about interplanting natural dye crops within the cotton fields so that there were additional revenue streams, along with biodiversity and polycultures. Similarly, Raddis operate with regenerative principles already in mind so interplant other food crops to build in self-sufficiency.

Additional to this, Kishore highlighted that silk cocoons are a source of protein in India. I’m wary, though, of how much production goes towards food, and how much towards sustaining a silk industry when you can’t realistically have both operating at once (the cocoon is where the silk comes from). At least silk production can fall under an agroforestry system, because mulberry trees are required to feed silkworms to harvest the cocoons, and so there are other benefits here, such as carbon drawdown and soil rejuvenation.

Finally, Ashna regarded the care label as a place for ingredients to be listed, which yes, does open up transparency for the industry, but is a more poetic link for food and fashion than I was expecting to hear in this conversation. An ingredients list would help educate consumers, but first there needs to be a breakdown of the language and the system currently in place - we can’t simply present a list of chemicals and expect to know what they are or do.

Related to that, there was mention otherwise under this question about the validity of certifications, with the newness of the Regenerative Organic standard. I didn’t make additional notes, but in hindsight think it was referring to the difficulties in building a framework that would suit all types of farming, from the small to the large, while still benefitting local economies - which is what is needed to sustain a regenerative organic practice. This then ran into a comment by Ashna that her sister had made, saying that you have to scale in order to make change. But this doesn’t sit well with a shift towards decentralised industries, where there is self-sufficiency and local economies, as with the above discussion on certifications; these small shifts have a ripple effect to other communities, and so I don’t feel it necessary to scale up all ventures or frameworks, and instead they should be tailored to the needs at hand.

Coming from the topic of decentralisation, though not necessarily mentioned as such, panellists had discussed miseducation regarding fibres and fabrics; Bel quoted Carolyn Franklin saying the introduction of polyester garments was the ‘democratisation of fashion’ - yet consumers don’t fully appreciate how devastating this has been, even with conversations targeted towards microplastics and fossil fuels. It stretches much further. So to build regenerative economies, panellists had chatted about using what we have and increasing recycling - however, both of these still require consumer and designer education, and the infrastructure, and policy change. What actually can we do first, and what should be done first?

Panellists on day one of the festival on the ‘processing’ panel. [Credit: The Festival of Natural Fibres].

The Nettle Dress.

The Festival ended with a showing of the feature length film from Dylan Howitt of Allan Brown’s seven year-long project - The Nettle Dress - to create a nettle dress entirely from foraged nettles that he had processed, spun, woven and sewn himself. It was quite the end - showing the craft involved in processing natural fibres the traditional way, the impact that can be had emotionally in connecting tangibly with the material, and the effort that needs to be taken to truly educate on the true cost of production.

The film is touring for March 2023 so try catch a screening. Watch a trailer of The Nettle Dress here.

The most surprising thing from this film is not actually the length of time taken to submerge into a project, or that the final garment was created purely from one person, but in fact that the warp was a nettle-flax ply. This means that the nettle fibre was plied with a flax fibre into a yarn to create the warp for the loom, presumably for tensile strength. It’s not like it’s cheating, though this little extra bit of knowledge shows the intricacy required in creating something in a monomaterial, and the compromises you may need to make.

“I know every inch of this yarn, it’s like an old friend”.

In the film Allan mentions 14400ft, though it’s unclear if this is for the warp thread only. He gathers and processes and spins seasonally to create the warp thread, and then needs to gather and process and spin some more for the weft thread. He describes the sensation of picking nettles in Spring, and how it is both an unpleasant and pleasant experience. He also mentioned the Hans Christian Andersen story of the Wild Swans, where a princess had to harvest nettles from the graveyard - using bare hands - and spin and weave them into eleven coats to save her eleven brothers from a curse.

“I can feel the clothiness of it now”.

When he shrouds himself with the finished fabric, it’s a nice moment. He says the above line. The steps taken to create the cloth were long and toilsome, but then he was able to understand the full breadth of the endeavour upon holding the material. The shroud became a place to absorb loss and grief - the thread was weak like the mind, the process and the finished cloth are strong.

My final surprise was found in the cloth processing stages, before the fabric was cut to be made into a dress. The cloth was washed to soften it, so unintentionally (I guess) creating a nettle tea solution that would then fertiliser for the land. This reminded me of Rosie Bristow using potato starch as a sizing agent for their flax; the simple traditional recipes that actually come as a byproduct.

Dylan Howitt and Allan Brown taking questions after the showing of The Nettle Dress. [Credit: The Festival of Natural Fibres].

Food-Fibre-Fashion.

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