In 1996 I started a three year degree in product design and manufacture at Liverpool’s Hope University. As the course progressed I became increasingly aware of a major disconnect in the general approach to product concept, materials sourcing and life cycle projection. No one else around me seemed to be even vaguely considering these factors, let alone making the connections between product and planet, which for me felt foundational. Terms like ‘eco friendly fashion’, environmentally conscious clothing, responsible clothing and sustainable fashion brands, simply didn’t exist yet.
With each new assignment came a new challenge for me - to increase my understanding of the intersection between the product I was proposing and the implications it held for people and planet, what we now often call, responsible clothing or responsible design
I used this to develop a new sense of clarity, and based on the increasing evidence about hemp’s plethora of environmentally positive properties from soil regeneration to health benefits to low impact fibre for textiles and even building materials I settled on the title of my thesis ‘Hemp for Textiles in England in the 1990’s’, and so began my journey as a sustainable fashion and textiles specialist, and my entry into a bold new movement for more environmentally friendly clothing in the fashion industry.
Back then, the internet was only just at its very beginning, and the books on textile fibres in the university library only gave me a few paragraphs, simply affirming hemp was a bast fibre. The term ‘Eco Fashion’ was still being defined. I didn’t know what to call the way I knew I needed to work, but I started to connect with others who were thinking the same way and who were starting to launch grassroots sustainable apparel brands who focused on quality every day natural fabrics clothing like, hemp tee shirts, calling it ‘earth friendly clothing’, these brands found their following not in the catwalk front rows, but rather in the environmental and social justice movement or in cultural niches such as Hip hop fashion.
I interviewed Kate Fletcher, who was working on one of the first industrial hemp trials with the Bioregional Development Group. I spoke to Greenfibres in Totnes, one of the UKs first sustainable fashion brands and online retailers (back then it was all offline and we did everything via land line telephone!) I learned how to do my first internet searches using terms like earth friendly clothing, sustainable fashion designers, hemp fashion, hemp tee shirts, and organic hemp clothing.
I soon found there were a small but dedicated handful of hemp clothing brand pioneers, in the UK, Europe, South Africa and North America who were forging a whole new approach, and we started calling it ‘eco fashion’.
For the next seven years I kept my focus on hemp for textiles, I moved to California, where my dad comes from, and there I connected with the emerging community of sustainable fashion brands, retailers and wholesalers. There was even an annual Industrial hemp festival in Santa Cruz, (I still have the poster somewhere), and I was able to start buying the new to market hemp fabrics by the yard.
Swirlspace, Natural High Lifestyle, Komodo, The Hemp Shop, Hemporium, Hemp Traders, Envirotextiles and of course THTC were some of these first hemp activists, and are still some of the best sustainable clothing brands (there are definitely more, and some who haven’t survived), dedicating themselves and their resources to bringing hemp textile products back into the world after many decades of this truly regenerative fibre being almost entirely banned from the global textile market.
I think it’s also really important to credit the dedicated individuals and businesses from China who were, also the ones behind this movement - the growers, the textiles developers and the processing facilities, creating new specialist factories in the face of the ongoing rise in fast fashion at that time.
These important partners must not be overlooked or go unmentioned, as they created the partnerships and the possibility of supply for the new demand while the global north remained paralysed by the continued bans on industrial hemp agriculture, coupled with the fast fading domestic textile spinning and weaving industry.( I’ll talk more about all this in a future post.)
So where are we now, after more than twenty five years of activism, dedication and commitment? Has hemp become the most popular fibre of choice? No. Is hemp on the high street? Very rarely. Is hemp found in luxury designer brands collections? Only as a green wash token.
So how does hemp fit into the fashion landscape?
For me, hemp, as a fibre, as a textile product, is still playing the role it has done for thousands of years. You will find it, like I did, when you look with integrity, when you search for ‘best sustainable clothing brands’ and it still holds all the qualities now being named as most desirable, such as ‘durable’, ‘circular’, ‘regenerative’ ‘ organic’, much as it always has.
