At Liflad we’re developing culture and infrastructure that supports scale-appropriate production of goods, owned and made by communities. We are at the beginning of a long journey questioning and reshaping our systems of material production and the economics surrounding them. There are many different layers to systemic change-making work and our focus is the inter-connected sectors of fashion, textiles, the arts, food and farming. Now this all sounds very ambitious as we are currently only two people, but our reach is spread by developing collaborations and close partnerships with other values-led organisations. We focus on culture and creativity with communities whilst simultaneously providing inspiration and infrastructure for local production.

LandWorks provides a supported route back into employment and the community for people in prison or at risk of going to prison. Trainees on their programmes experience a wide range of land-based activities, related skills and crafts to develop confidence and improve well-being and resilience and only 5% go on to reoffend (national average is around 50%). Head Grower Holly sowed 20 sqm of flax in their market garden as part of our Devon Grows Flax project. LandWorks staff and trainees came together with us to harvest their flax and learn how through various processing stages the plant can be turned into linen and other useful items.

After stooking (standing) this year’s flax in the field, we used the wooden hand breaking and scutching tool to crush previous saved flax to remove the woody inner core and outer shives. We make a point of not discussing the issues with fashion when we give workshops. We like people to engage with the process independently and make their own observations. Without any prior discussion of fashion, one of the trainees immediately had a light bulb moment, commenting that it was amazing to experience the difference between making clothing in this way vs the speed of a fast fashion purchase. This transformative neural spark of connection, between the reality of turning fibre into cloth and the overconsumption of clothing, is what we are hoping for. It’s thrilling when this happens because this is how change begins.

Another trainee loved the processing and was fascinated to see the straw turn into fibre, she’d come in specially that day to harvest the flax and understand what it could become. Although fairly hard physical work, hackling (combing) the flax felt like a soothing activity and people loved to see the golden fibre emerge. We all made cordage from the fibre that was processed, demonstrating the LandWorks ethos of sharing tasks as equals and building confidence through crafts.

A daily communal meal, made together by trainees and staff using produce grown by Holly and trainees in their market garden, is an important part of the rehabilitation process at LandWorks. Over lunch we discussed fascinating old words now out of use, such as waldeinsamkeit (forest loneliness), delving into flax words such as breaking, heckling and scutching and exploring the rumour (sadly unproven) that ‘heckler’ originally comes from those who were heckling flax. We had such a lovely visit, it felt like we gained so much by being there and witnessing the care and conviviality present in the place.

Through Devon Grows Flax we’re reaching a range of communities and places through free workshops, exhibitions and community growing schemes. By connecting with our soil, gardens and local landscape, by understanding where materials come from, we believe this will ultimately direct people’s focus away from consumption. When you put hands in the soil and nurture a seed you become very proud of what you grow, you want to care for it and make good use of it.

This nurturing of life-centred practice is one of the reasons we undertake community work, to spread the word and create connections that people take away with them. In a world of coming economic and ecological crisis, with potential energy and food shortages, textiles are NOT the most important item we should be growing. However, developing a variety of hands-on skills will become increasingly important in a digitally dominated world and re-thinking clothing opens doors to a more systemic view. This view can be strengthened by layering other communal experiences, such as growing food, participating in a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) box scheme, picking apples in community orchards, using sharing libraries, repair cafes and creating community food forests.

We hope this contributes to a world view that understands the importance of participating in bioregions and localisation, that foregrounds life-centric practice. This is not always open to everyone as you need capacity and time (things that usually come with privilege and wealth), but the more people who experience it, the more chance there is for change. Understanding of this world view is needed more broadly to enable more complex and financially challenging activities; such as building local food infrastructure and a politics that will support the economics and ecology of bioregionalism. Bringing this about will offer more long term security and resilience for everyone, particularly the most vulnerable, and those who may require the care of brilliant places like LandWorks.

To find out more about LandWorks read this Guardian article and to donate to their amazing project visit their website.

Devon Grows flax is a community heritage and learning project made possible by the Heritage Lottery Fund and collaboratively delivered by Liflad and Transition Town Totnes. Sign up for project news here.

Background

I live in South Devon and I’ve been working in textiles for the past 13 years. I fell in love with textiles as a child when I discovered the magic of creating things from cloth and I’ve been making ever since. After completing a Fashion Design degree, I began working as a designer. Like many, it opened my eyes to the true scale of production and consumption in the industry, which was in stark contrast to the craft I had fallen in love with and studied.

As my career developed, I transitioned from design to circular textile specialist, always seeking ways to reduce impact. I focused on driving change in textiles through the development and adoption of circular design principles: strategies which aim to reduce impact and encourage textile products to cycle in a way that minimises impact, optimises use and minimises waste. I facilitated working groups, wrote toolkits and guidance, developed training and workshops to embed the practice.

The Textile System

Circular design improvements are being adopted by the wider industry with some success, in some cases reducing the tonne-by-tonne impact of textiles. However, annual data shows that despite reducing the impact of individual products or fabric tonnages through circular improvements, overall net impact is still increasing. This is because year-on-year increasing production volumes are cancelling out product-level savings.1

The current system is set up to prioritise profit and growth over reducing environmental impact, and having worked on strategy with some of the largest textile brands, it seems to me that only full regulatory reform will disrupt how this system operates in an increasingly ‘oversized’ fashion system. Technological advances regularly appear to the industry as the next potential silver bullet, keeping alive the hope that a novel solution will cancel out impact so the industry can continue business as usual. We are now seeing a post-consumer textile landscape which is on the brink of collapse, with solutions struggling to make a commercial case due to the proliferation of textiles being used and disposed of. Can a system set up to prioritise the wrong things can be fixed or changed to achieve the reduction in impact that we urgently need?

What has Changed?

If we rewind back a generation or two, people owned very few clothes. They made them last, repaired them, valued them. Fabric was more scarce, and people often made their own clothes. Being involved in the act of making connects a person to the product. They used their time to create something, and this time and connection creates a perceived value.

Today we are disconnected from the supply chain - the growing, processing, making is all out of sight - not just for textiles but other industries too like food. Often items are bought by the tap of a screen and arrive on doorsteps the next day, creating a feeling of disposability - if it’s not quite right you can tap the screen again and another will appear the next day. That immediacy makes it difficult to grasp the time, energy and care that goes into making products, and this can make them feel more disposable. Often, satisfaction comes from the act of purchasing, rather than in the process of making.

Our relationship with clothing and products has changed, and I believe that through community and creativity, we can remember and reconnect to the value of things through experiential learning and embodied skills.

Last year I watched ‘The Nettle Dress’ film, during which Allan Brown described his experience:

This quote stuck with me, but I didn’t fully understand it until I grew flax for the first time.

Growing Flax

I first experienced flax in 2025 through a community project, Totnes Grows Flax, hosted by Liflad and Transition Town Totnes. The experience gave me the opportunity to consider the very beginning of the product lifecycle: the raw material stage that I had little direct experience of.

I planted the seed and watched over the next 100 days as it grew, flowered, set seed, and finally became ready for harvest. I reflected that often it feels frustrating to wait for things to happen, but this felt different. I appreciated the journey as I watched the plant grow and change, it became more precious to me as I became more involved in the process and invested in the outcome.

On processing day, I sat alongside others patiently breaking, scutching, and heckling the flax into long, golden strands of linen fibre. As we worked, we shared reflections on the process - the time and effort involved, the realisation that this is how linen was once made in the UK. It sparked something in me - it seemed so magical that I had planted a seed and was now holding a handful of flax fibre ready to spin and weave into linen. I felt a renewed sense that things were possible, that I could do things. At a time when so much can feel difficult and stressful in the world, I had grown a small piece of hope.

A New Approach

The experience changed my relationship with textiles, and marked a new chapter for me as an individual. Feeling empowered with a renewed sense of purpose, I reframed my approach to textiles with a new focus:

Connection to nature, textiles and craft: Reprioritise craft by connecting with nature and growing, spinning and weaving, pattern cutting and making textiles again.

Enable resilient futures: Develop and build resilient systems interconnected with land and people.

I will do this by working with Liflad CIC, a not-for-profit design lab developing strategy and practice to enable low impact, local livelihoods rooted in nature and community.

I am hugely proud to be joining Zoe as a partner in a shared mission, contributing my technical expertise and experience to an approach I believe gives us hope for a resilient future.

It’s been over two years since I undertook a big train journey across Europe to explore bioregional resilience and it’s relationship to flax. As you’ll probably be aware, I explored agriculture, small-scale processing, spinning infrastructure, textile cooperatives and connected with projects who prioritise community and the arts over profit.

A key learning was that infrastructure and inspiration, when supported by culture and creativity, can bring a seemingly impossible task to life within a region.

Returning, I set about the ‘seemingly impossible task’ of revitalising flax and linen production in the UK, something this substack is documenting. I’ve chosen to frame this work using the distinct but related themes of infrastructure and inspiration combined with culture, creativity and community.

Culture, Creativity and Community

After several years of field building - developing relationships both literally and metaphorically in the field - it feels like the work we are doing at Liflad CIC is gaining momentum. On the culture and creativity side, we’ve recently won heritage lottery funding, a pretty amazing achievement for a tiny organisation. We are very excited to co-deliver a multi year project with Transition Town Totnes called “Devon Grows Flax”. Work starts now on community building, heritage research and skill sharing, well-being through crafts, flax education in schools, creative exhibitions and development of a community cloth. More on this coming soon.

Infrastructure and Inspiration

We are also launching a new venture called Common Cloth Works, supported by a small foundation that encourages cooperative and ecological activity. Common Cloth Works will provide infrastructure and inspiration in equal measure. Based on a beautiful farm in South Devon, we will demonstrate the cultivation and production of agroecological textiles with the micro-manufacturing of flax fibre into yarn, cloth and clothing. This is a slow and challenging process but we have worked out a cunning plan for action.

It really is the dream outlined here coming to life but in a form I could not have predicted or imagined. We will work in partnership with our surroundings, experimenting with innovative methods to keep the farm ecosystem in balance through careful experimentation, using old and knew knowledge to develop replicable, low-impact production processes.

This Liflad substack will continue to document all our work and thoughts on bioregional production and developing different livelihoods. As Common Cloth Works is such a big project, I’m thrilled to announce it will also have it’s own Substack - whoop! As a collaboration there will be additional voices joining the output and much to share.

We’d love you to follow our exciting journey into the specifics and challenges of vertically micro-manufacturing the first bioregional, ecological UK linen in decades! Please SIGN UP below.

Common Cloth Works

Developing new ways of growing and making clothing in South Devon, England.

By Zoe Gilbertson

Thank you!! :)

The Cambridge talk was based on research, theory and concepts developed via a Churchill Fellowship I received in 2024. This will be the last in a series of writings that have evolved from this project as we now move into action on the ground.

Bioregional Demonstration

To demonstrate the possibilities of localised production we need real life products that people can hold in their hands. These are items at the end of the supply chains. I call them bioregional demonstration products – tangible items grown and made in place – and they carry immense value beyond the financial. They embody shared purpose, materials and stories, showing what new systems of production can achieve. The following projects, seen left to right in the image above, show what these can look like:

1 - Lin et Chanvre Bio, (French organic linen and hemp association) coordinated farmers, processors and makers in France to produce 200m of hemp cloth and 100 pairs of jeans, distributed to participants and key figures such as the Mayor of Normandy. The jeans became powerful symbols of collective effort, far more persuasive than reports or presentations.

2 - The Linen Project co-founded by Willemien Ippel and Pascale Gatzen in the Netherlands, has created the first dutch linen cloth in years, woven into garments such as Joline Jolink’s linen jacket, carrying the pride of its makers.

3 - House of Design in Groningen, led by Eileen Blackmore, has produced multiple flax-based items, beginning with small souvenirs that seeded wider engagement and infrastructure. Blackmore stresses how bioregional products strengthen community identity, retain young people, and showcase “the magic of flax.”

4 - Mijuin, founded by Pauline Beuzelin in Normandy, France, uses only local organic linen to create products that directly embody farming and place.

Bioregional products can serve as cultural totems, making visible the connections between land, people and process. Their relational value far exceeds monetary worth, inspiring communities by embodying place, history and potential futures.

Hemp Production

At Les Chanvres de l’Atlantique, in Saint-Geours-de-Maremne, Southwest France, they also make demonstration products on a mid scale and utilise all aspects of hemp fibre from food to building materials and cloth. All require slightly different and carefully planned growing, harvesting and processing but in a holistic, vertically integrated system they can work well together. They start with the hemp plant itself and build corresponding relationships carefully with the land, seasons, climate and organic farmers outwards from this. This care and attention is paramount if the entire system is to thrive.

Cooperative Cultures

Re thinking governance requires changing how we organise, share knowledge, and develop structures emphasising value beyond the monetary. Systems that encourage cooperation require more social input but have many long-term and wide-reaching benefits. Cooperatives provide an enterprise container that can embody agroecological values such as social and ecological care.

Due to the complexities of organising complex fashion supply chains, textile cooperatives are a rare form of business around the globe. However, we can find some inspiring examples in France and Spain. The French in particular like to work in coops, with 22,000 cooperative enterprises compared to 7000 in the UK, and development of the ‘social solidarity economy’ supported by a ‘Minister for the Ecological and Solidarity Transition’.

Virgo Coop, is an inspiring hemp processor and fabric producer in the Occitanie region, using stakeholder and worker coops to progress collaboration and mutual benefit between farmers, builders, mills and weavers. They manage a decortication coop transforming organic hemp and a weaving coop. Virgo buys local wool to blend with the hemp they grow and have partnerships with spinners in France and Poland.

Similarly, Koopera is a textile waste collection and re-use clothing cooperative operation near Bilbao in the Basque area of Northern Spain. Their work over the last 40 years to collect waste, reuse it and support social integration and livelihoods is a phenomenal example of what can be achieved when you put people before profit. 300 cooperatives (staff) work collectively with no hierarchy - only democratically agreed management - supporting another 300, often seriously disadvantaged people through schemes of integration and training. Their advanced and well organised facility feels like being at the coalface of fashion.

Producer Collectives

To sum up and produce a vision for these examples and concepts, 1 ha worth of flax can produce almost 1000 m of fabric per year and 650 pairs of jeans. This diagram illustrates the actors and places within the process, some of these roles and places could be undertaken in the same location by the same people if desired.

For example, using the vehicle of a local CSA scheme (community supported agriculture), as exists with organic vegetables, people could commit to a linen ‘produce’ box over a year. This concept proposes that value, roles and process across the supply chain could be apportioned fairly in relation to time and monetary value in a distributive, commons-based system. The revenue from the system should be able to support enough for all. I wont go into the numbers but the potential is palpable.

A producer collective, combined with distributed production could reimagine a whole system. One can extrapolate that producer collectives in 100 rural market towns or villages could produce:

• 1000 ha of flax

• 100,000m cloth

• 65,000 jeans

• 300 garment machinists

• 100 mill workers

• 80 weavers

• 50 spinning technicians

• 25 designer/pattern cutters

• 100 coordinators

These figures are over simplified but illustrate meaningful livelihood creation, leading to more resilient and varied rural employment by bringing in the potential of fibre, textiles and clothing. Once you understand the system and the consequences of scale you can start to make well informed decisions.

A combination of medium, small scale and micro scale set-ups will create a resilient, bioregional agroecological economies made up of food and fibre enterprise. The work is now to demonstrate this and create experimental small scale enterprises that can learn and grow together. Some of the projects that have Liflad has helped developed so far are:

South West textile Commons - sharing funding and knowledge with an aim to develop decentralised textile production, supporting fibre farmers, processors and micro-enterprises.

European textile Commons - sharing knowledge across borders as small-scale flax fibre and textile processing systems develop.

Totnes Grows Flax and Devon Grows Flax - communities learning to grow and process local fibre flax with the aim to develop culture, creativity and well-being.

South Devon Fibre Hub - demonstrating agroecological textile production from flax seed to linen cloth.

We are putting the concepts mentioned into action, experimenting to see if new scales and ecosystems are possible. This creates hyper-local, context-led action held gently by a wide boundary systems view and strongly held duties of care. We cannot wait to start producing our own tangible, hold-in-your-hand, outputs.

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Putting together a quick presentation to explain my own community project - Totnes Grows Flax, (soon to be Devon Grows Flax) I reflect on the reasoning behind it’s creation. Beyond the highly inspiration projects such as the Swedish 1 sqm flax, Berta’s flax and The Linen Project, there lies a pragamatic systems perspective when combined with Liflad’s other projects. Our vital infrastructure in development - to turn flax seed into cloth using vertically integrated micro manufacturing processes - makes sense within a community rediscovering the beauty, heritage and utility of flax processing using traditional, artisan, hand tool methods. Community projects can open the door to much wider interests and engagement.

In the Churchill report, I described a Nova Scotia Flax to linen ecosystem observed through online interviews and by visiting their machinery hosted at an Engineering University in France. Jennie Green, a key part of that ecosystem, recently got in touch. Jennie is now leading Flax Fibre to Fabric, a 4-year government funded research project to explore the potential for commercial flax production in Atlantic Canada. Her team includes seven professors from four universities across Eastern Canada, apparently impressed by my report and it’s conclusions on scale, community and small-scale supply chains. I am looking forward to talking with them all soon. I mention this because I love the synergy, community and connections that are continually developing with people sharing knowledge around the world. Whilst focusing on the local needs of their own communities, people are creating related but unique and contextually situated responses. This is how I believe we have to approach change.

I am sharing the Nova Scotia Case study here and look forward to learning where the Nova Scotia ecosystem is branching out to next.

2024 CASE STUDY - Nova Scotia Flax to Linen Ecosystem

“Don’t forget that agriculture has the word culture in it. Tend to the culture with as much care as you would the soil under your feet. Perhaps it is the soil under your feet.”

-Unknown American Elder via Adam Wilson, farmer.

In Nova Scotia, Canada, a supportive, innovative and creative organic flax to linen ecosystem has recently developed underpinned by history, culture and several determined and brilliant women. The region has a maritime climate, similar to parts of Europe and is suitable for flax growing. The area is historically economically depressed but has a strong backbone culture of self-sufficiency and hard work. Jennifer Green is a researcher and textile practitioner who runs the “Flaxmobile” project, a mobile teaching space she takes on a 400 km journey across the province several times a year to work with small-scale farmers, smallholders and permaculturists.

Patricia Bishop, together with husband Josh, runs an organic farm in Nova Scotia. They produce arable crops and have a CSA, providing organic veg boxes for the local area. In 2011, Jennifer gave a presentation at a farming conference, at TapRoot Farms, about her research on linen. Inspired, Patricia began growing flax after the conference. She and Josh established that flax grows well in Nova Scotia but harvesting and processing was another matter. Patricia is a dynamic and resourceful entrepreneur/farmer so she set about developing on-farm flax processing equipment with a local farm machinery fabricator/engineer and invested $600,000 CAD in the process. Another outcome of their linen exploration was the investment in a Belfast Mini Mill to process wool and experiment with flax tow. The value of the farm’s investment of infrastructure to the region cannot be understated.

Jennifer, meanwhile, had developed the Flaxmobile project and was touring the region, building interest and knowledge around the flax-to-linen process through growing and hand-processing workshops. Jennifer was following ‘a desire to learn about the material, how it handles, how it’s grown and what it feels like as a maker and weaver to create your own cloth from beginning to end and to share this journey with others’. Her project caters to a variety of different farms, some who share harvesting equipment, others who harvest small plots by hand. Nobody grows more than half an acre, with most cultivating much smaller amounts. She works with organic farms, permaculture, no-till, tractors, hand tools and broadforks. Some farmers hand broadcast seed but most single seed in rows as it’s much easier to weed. Jennifer finds that you need to plant early in the season to get the full 100 day growth cycle but that lots of plants mature at 85 days and the fibre is finer when you harvest earlier. It’s also key to avoid excess nitrogen in the soil as this will lead to branching, thick stalks and thick fibre. Compost can help with growth but too much can cause lodging and of course, every field is different.

The Flaxmobile in its second iteration, received generous arts funding and now pairs artisans and artists with farmers, celebrating the outputs that are collectively produced. This creates much greater visibility through exhibitions and a wide variety of engaging content that can be used to promote flax in the region. On the question of appropriate scaled machinery, Jennifer remains curious. Her research uncovered that 100,000 yards of flax were grown and woven by hand each year. There’s a part of her which says, why not hand process and connect with this history, in awe of the true cost and labour involved?. She has considered a semi-mechanised foot treadle for scutching but beyond that she’s not sure. Jennifer acknowledges that the slowest part is the spinning. She works on this by hand and Patricia has plans for a small scale flax spinning workshop, once funding can be raised.

The TapRoot scutching machinery, developed by Patricia works well but it is slower than initially hoped and the output is currently not much faster than hand-processing. Jennifer can hand process 6-8 kg of flax per day and the TapRoot Machines can process 10-25kg. This will increase as the machinery is updated and improved but processing 100kg per day will only produce 20kg of long line fibre. At the time of writing, scutched long fibre is trading at €1.90/kg so one day’s work would generate less than €40 income. Hand processing or lab scale processing is not viable within a typical linear system but other financial arrangements within a supply chain are possible.

Beinic Belinen Collectif in Brittany wishes to develop machinery to produce 200 kg of scutched fibre per day, 10 times the output of TapRoot Machines. This would account to €380 which makes some sense economically in the current system as it would pay for labour and any costs such as energy, buildings etc. However, as the Flaxmobile has generated so much interest in the region, many small scale farmers are coming to TapRoot to have their flax processed and will pay $30 an hour to put their flax through the machinery. They are not interested in marketing or selling their flax, they just want to spin it themselves, enjoy what they have created and participate in their own process of growing clothing or yarn. This is a demonstration of value beyond the financial. If the machines can be refined and improved to input 50kg+ per day (or one bale per week), the Tap Root machines will be able to process one hectare’s worth of flax per year. This may not be viable for the existing market but there are possibilities within a localised system to calculate value and costs differently.

In this fibre production ecosystem drawing, inspired by Nova Scotia, the enabling conditions are found in the culture which is a combination of creative arts, history and community. This cultural network of mycelium feeds the pioneer roots who support the formation of the trunk of the tree - likely the farms - which in turn provide the strength and resilience to support the productive infrastructure. The infrastructure, plus the nourishment of capital and diversity of regulation allows the nuts, leaves and fruits of the system to grow, representing the various fibre products produced by the entire ecosystem working together.

Developing a new small scale flax-to-linen system to compete with the open, existing global market is not going to be viable but this is not a motivation in Nova Scotia. There are many other ways to flexibly structure enterprise and process which can distribute value in alternative ways that show a lot of potential. New fibre eco systems will always be place-based and context driven and every instance will likely be different depending on the history, land, culture and personalities of the residents. Entrepreneurial risk takers and creative innovators and pioneers are incredibly valuable. The value of this effort and commitment to the region cannot be overstated. When people take on the risk and invest in infrastructure it’s incredibly supportive for others within the ecosystem. TapRoot Farm took on the risk of developing fibre processing machinery, they believe in it and are working towards a goal of local linen production. It allows other people to come and say they share this goal and in turn this becomes a collective endeavour. Practical infrastructure and inspirational leadership, when supported by culture and creativity, can bring the seemingly impossible alive within a region.

One of my steps back to practice was receiving a Churchill Fellowship. In early 2024 I travelled through Europe to investigate small scale machinery and cooperative methods to support the growing, processing and production of flax and hemp. What follows is part 1 of a lightly edited version of the Cambridge talk, part 2 will follow in my next post.

Most readers are probably quite familiar with the frames of commoning and bioregionalism but this is where we begin……

What is a Bioregion?

A bioregion shares ecological, geographical and cultural characteristics. It starts with ecology and the landscape. Often defined by watershed or geographical boundaries. Bioregionalism is more than a philosophy — it’s a way of life rooted in place. It asks us to align our politics, culture, and economy with the natural boundaries of watersheds, soil and terrain.

A fibreshed is formed along the same lines as a bioregion. Conceptually developed in America by Rebecca Burgess, it considers a soil to soil circular system of fabric and clothing creation, where fibres are grown, processed and worn in place. Clothing is an important fundamental human need that must be provisioned for. We all wear clothing, it sits on our bodies and can be a direct way to connect to land and community once you start to think about it, which many people don’t.

What is a Commons?

Moving onto the commons, this can be privately owned land where people have historical rights, such as fishing, grazing animals or collecting wood, or it can refer to a model of collective ownership and stewardship of shared resources. We are steeped in the commons in the UK - we have a house of commons, we are commoners, people are ‘common’.

Guy Standing, economist and commons advocate, often talks of the Charter of the Forest developed in 1217 which was meant to protect the rights of common people. Over the years our commons were enclosed which essentially forced ‘common people’ into industrial servitude to feed the fires of capitalism. It is claimed that many people used to live happily on commons, fishing, hunting, collecting firewood etc and did not want to work in factories. Between 1760 and 1870, over 4,000 acts of Parliament, instituted by a landowning elite, confiscated seven million acres of commons. We are still suffering the consequences of that action today.

According to David Bollier, commons-based transformations will “allow overshooting systems to find new ways to work within the biocapacity of their own regions”. The systems and governance we use to grow and produce bioregional materials is as important as the materials themselves. Commons theory, as developed by David and his late academic partner Silke Helfrich, frames commoning as a social practice of collective stewardship, grounded in care and relational accountability.

Bast fibre systems that prioritise knowledge-sharing, shared infrastructure, and cooperative governance over profit can be understood as acts of commoning. These practices resist enclosure and extraction, offering models of textile production as cultural and ecological care. A commons is not just a resource. It’s a self-organised social system where human practices and social culture help to make the shared use of a resource work.

My interpretation of Commoning means collectively caring for social networks, knowledge, cultural practices, heritage and resources which are shared for the benefit of everyone in the community. As Bollier states ‘ it is an activation of relationships that bind communities together’ and that ‘these concepts create a framework from which to experiment and build new ways of working together and generates value in ways not easily captured by markets and prices’.

Cosmopolitan Commoning

Cosmopolitan Localism connects communities globally through shared exchange in production and consumption. Distributed and micro-scale production systems, embed production within communities supported by shared technologies. Cosmo-Local Production extends this by localising material production near source and market while using global knowledge to drive innovation and community voice. Examples include Farm Hack (US), L’Atelier Paysan (France), Wikihouse, and Open Food Networks (UK).

The term cosmo-local commoning succinctly describes an ethos underpinning the supply chains of alternative modes of production. I love to use this phrase as I feel it describes a very sensible method of working where we can learn, share knowledge and develop enterprise in many places concurrenlty.

So how do we apply all this theory to linen and textile supply chains?

Agroecology

Everything begins with cultivation, with growing and land. With bast-fibres this involves understanding agronomy, soil, biodiversity, drilling seeds, managing weeds, harvesting and retting straw (in fields or in tanks). Flax and hemp can support organic crop rotations whilst creating valuable and useful outputs. They can also support biodiversity and reduce our use of plastic.

We need farming systems that work in alignment with ecological processes rather than treating nature as a production input. Agroecology offers a framework for such alignment, emphasising farming that works with nature and manages the balance of relationships between plants, animals, people and their environment. Rethinking cultivation begins with organic growing and agroecology. The 10 elements of agroecology developed by the food and agriculture organisation of the UN provide a great explanation of how this works.

Land-use

Working with land requires thinking about land use. Some may question whether a country should give over a proportion of its arable land to growing textile material when food should take priority, and this is a valid concern. However we eat food all the time whereas textiles can be in use for many years.

These are playful but carefully calculated estimates that show that one hectare of carefully managed land can make 10,000 loaves of bread or 650 pairs of jeans. The use value of the land over time is very different - these thought experiments show how little land would be taken up by growing flax for textiles, bread is consumed quickly whereas well-made jeans can last many years. There could be room for both.

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Re-thinking production scale

Once we’ve considered the land involved in supply chains we need to think about the scale at which we will operate. One of the many stumbling blocks to creating localised, UK fibre is the extensive machinery needed to turn raw plant material into practical value such as insulation, growing medium or textile yarn. In my research I’ve been looking at bast fibre equipment and process at various scales to consider how to best support localised fibre production and meaningful livelihoods.

There are many steps and plenty of processes involved in flax to linen creation. Once grown, harvesting flax requires a specialist flax puller and the Europeans have machinery to handle this of varying sizes. Post harvest, flax requires retting (rotting), in some places this is completed in tanks but in France and Belgium ‘dew retting’ takes place in the field over 3-6 weeks. Once baled, the flax is transported to a nearby scutching mill. After rippling where the seeds are removed, the flax is broken, breaking involves the crimping of the plant through geared wheels, then scutching, where blades bash the fibre in a circular flow to remove all the shives (the woody outer core). Finally we have hackling, where the fibre is drawn through a series of progressively narrowing combs to produce a smooth, blonde, ponytail bundle of flax. Breaking and scutching machinery is not complicated to build and with the right technical plans, can be made by any local fabricator.

Large Scale mill

This is an example of a large scale scutching mill in France. Scutching facilities are abundant in Normandy and Belgium but they are rare in many European locations and lie at the root of why new linen production is difficult.

In the UK our last flax mills closed in the 1950’s but these were a temporary war measure and most of our linen industry in England was gone long by end of the 19th century. Flax and linen production seems to have aligned with wars in previous centuries, furnishing aeroplanes, creating fire hoses, uniforms etc.

Mid Scale Mill

This image shows a medium scale scutching mill at Mallon Linen in Ireland where Charlie Mallon and Helen Keys are singled handedly reviving Irish linen. A strangely challenging endeavour for a country that was a global leader in linen production.

Small Scale Mill

A new scale to consider is something that could work on small farms and fibre collectives. These are scutching machines from Taproot Fibre, developed by flax pioneer Patricia Bishop in Nova Scotia, Canada. I saw them at work at the École Nationale D’Ingenieurs De Tarbes. Professor Pierre Ouagne, put together a small-scale spinning facility for linen and hemp that also has scutching capability. It was thrilling to see the full process in action from raw plant to final yarn under one roof.

Micro Scale Mill

This is Rosie and Nick at Fantasy Fibre Mill, they are working to a ‘micro-scale’ and having experienced their machines first hand I can say they are much more promising than those developed by TapRoot Fibre. They are inexpensive to develop, adaptable and quick.

Scutching Scales

The table below shows processing calculations per hectare using different scales of machinery. Assumptions used are - a low yield of five tonnes of straw, and the machine working an eight-hour day, five days per week for 40 weeks per year. These figures are approximate but well-informed and support illustrations made throughout this section. Please don’t quote me though! The figures have evolved a little from those published in my original Churchill report and may continue to as my knowledge increases.

From the table we can calculate that:

• Large-scale scutching mill machinery set-up costs approx. £15m, services 3000 ha, employs 30 people, creates 3 million metres of cloth or 2 million pairs of jeans.

• Mid-scale scutching mill machinery set-up costs approx. £3m, services 1000 ha, employs 15 people, creates 1 million metres of cloth or 640,000 pairs of jeans.

• Small-scale scutching mill machinery set-up costs approx. £150-300k, services 50 ha, employs 5 people, creates 48,000 metres of cloth or 32,000 pairs of jeans.

• Micro-scale scutching mill machinery set-up costs approx. £15k, services 2 ha, employs 2 people, creates 2000 metres of cloth or 1300 pairs of jeans.

The larger and medium scales will service large areas of land but set-up costs are very high and to make returns on investment would mean competing in volatile global markets. In the UK we would also need investment in expensive infrastructure such as large-scale harvesting machinery and transport networks to move the bales around. We would need to ship the thousands of bales of scutched and hackled flax to a French spinning mill. This entails additional costs, post-Brexit, and makes the UK less competitive in an already difficult market.

Spinning Scales

After scutching and heckling we move onto to spinning. Spinning flax/hemp can be a wet or dry process starting with sliver which is doubled and drawn into a rove which has twist added and finally spun into yarn, then woven or knitted into cloth. Spinning is the most difficult area of the supply chain to establish. The spinning facility at Tarbes is perfect for micro production, Pierre Ouagne bought some equipment from Linaficio and had the drafting mechanisms made in India, he has a 6 spindle machine.

We can estimate that:

• Large-scale spinning mill machinery set-up cost approx. £5m, services 666 ha, employs 20 people, creates 300 tonnes of yarn or 430,000 pairs of jeans.

• Mid-scale spinning mill machinery set-up cost approx. £2.5m, services 66 ha, employs 5 people, produces 30 tonnes of yarn or 43,000 pairs of jeans.

• Small-scale spinning mill machinery set-up cost approx. £150-300k, services 5 ha, employs 2 people, produces 2.25 tonnes of yarn or 3250 pairs of jeans.

• Micro-scale spinning mill machinery set-up cost approx. £15k, services 1 ha, employs 1 person, produces 0.45 tonnes of yarn or 650 pairs of jeans.

These statements are based on considered but anecdotal estimates however they show that spinning is capital intensive but low on labour. At the micro scale a £15k investment in machinery could support the employment of 1 person, at the large-scale this is £250,000 per person. The French government recently invested millions in a new spinning mill in Normandy.

Yarn will be more expensive at the lower scales, however, if one considers investment value through livelihood creation, through rural resilience, ecological benefits rather than capital accumulation and profit, the picture looks very different.

I’m an advocate for the small and micro scales but I think it’s important that people have the information they need to make decisions suitable for their own contexts.

Open Source Textile Mills

Fantasy Fibre Mill is experimenting at the micro-scale, developing innovative, easy-to-assemble, inexpensive spinning production lines. They work collaboratively with various small-scale, open source, textile machinery enthusiasts across the globe and they are working together on all sorts of easy to assemble, collaboratively developed machinery. They have a fully functioning flax breaker, scutcher and small wool spinning machine, the flax spinner is a work in progress but getting there. This is an example of cosmo local commoning, the group of textile machine enthusiasts use a discord server called Open Source Textile Mills to communicate and share learnings.

Distributed Manufacture

It matters how we set up any processing infrastructure. These diagrams illustrate the different scales and their potential distribution across an area the size of the UK.

Working at smaller scales means that the benefits of additional crop rotations, processing mills and artisan-micro-maker labs could be spread throughout the country, bringing greater resilience and livelihoods to rural areas. Energy demands would be lower and distributed as processing would be localised and require limited transport.

The scales of machinery could vary depending on the arable potential of an area but it’s easy to imagine 100-plus small-scale distributed facilities in place of one large industrial behemoth. It would provide purpose and activity (jobs) for hundreds of people in place of a few.

The only argument against is this is to support capital accumulation and pricing to make proft for a few shareholders. It’s time to start thinking differently.

I will explore this topic further in my next post and welcome any feedback in the meantime.

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Tyson Yunkaporta, indigenous academic and Australian deep-thinker, has described how if we are to address the polycrises and create a long-term liveable planet we need diversity. Diversity of thought, process, peoples, concepts, ecosystems, everything. (Donald Trump is doing everything he can to limit diversity in the US, because perhaps instinctively he understands it has the potential to moderate or even thwart capitalism.)

We humans depend on methods of production to provide the goods we desire for a comfortable and fulfilling life. We must produce these items less harmfully and to enable this, will require diversity in production. A healthy ecosystem is diverse and small-scale manufacturing systems have the potential to contain much more diversity than industrial levels of production. I use bread and linen - basic daily items of food and textiles to illustrate this position.

Climate change is creating unpredictable, wildly variable weather patterns, which makes farming for food and fibre production more challenging. Our agricultural systems need to develop conditions of resilience and diversity can spread risk. Large-scale systems of production require individual concentrations of power and homogeneity. Once you have acquired the capital and purchased an expensive, large metal machine for manufacturing goods, be that food or clothing, you can only feed it what it was designed to consume. If the raw material feeding the machine changes in some way, for example, due to a shift in climactic conditions, it may be difficult or impossible for the machine to accommodate it.

Take the basic human staple of bread, a farmer does not know whether a season will bring intense rain or drought and can balance risk by growing different varieties. Heritage grains, landraces and population wheats grown for flour all bring diversity into an arable system. In the case of population wheats, this happens within the same crop. The soil, fungi, bacteria and insects surrounding fields also like variety, this keeps an ecosystem healthy and alive as it is constantly evolving and adjusting.

Modern wheat is bred for increased yield but with this comes a reliance on inputs sold by the same companies who are selling the seed. These patented varieties are increasingly bringing more risk to the farmer because their conditions are as fixed as weather conditions are variable.

Most farms in the UK grow a single variety of wheat and this suits the calibration of large-scale milling machines. Innovative farmers are adapting to climate change by growing heritage and population varieties to create diversity and resilience. The South West Grain Network contains farmers, bakers and millers working collectively to grow grain that adapts to a range of weather to enable long term food security and improved biodiversity. Open-minded large-scale millers may wish to process these new grains, but their systems and machines find it very difficult to accept difference. Small-scale millers figure out how to mill variable grains on machines they can calibrate and adapt. The bakers within this network also learn to be flexible and bake with a variety of conditions that the flour produces. It is a challenging but rewarding endeavour that requires dedication, patience and knowledge exchange.

Over the past year I’ve visited a range of textile mills becoming aware of how machinery dictates the outcome of the yarn and the possibilities of design. This sounds obvious but as a designer, it’s not until you understand the machine, that you can understand your latitude as a maker.

Take wool for example, assumptions are often made that a wool mill can transform any kind of fleece off the back of a sheep into any kind of yarn, but this is untrue. An experienced hand spinner has a direct relationship with a raw material, be that wool or flax and can respond to the fibre’s strengths to achieve results so much stronger or finer than a mill could. Manufactured yarn is multi-step process requiring many kinds of machinery to enable specified outcomes controlled by settings in response to the raw material input. Machines cannot react in the way that hands and eyes can.

Currently we can’t process flax into yarn in the UK and if we are to invest in new machinery and set up a supply chain it would cost millions of pounds. Flax is flowering plant from the family linaceae, grown to produce linen. Agriculturally it is similar to wheat and open to the vagaries of weather. When the yields of a crop are variable, investment in expensive machinery is a difficult case to make, irrespective of any political and ethical persuasions.

As the biggest growers and processors of flax in the world, the French, are starting to change their growing practices as crop outcomes are no longer dependable. If we are to develop new textile systems that work in partnership with nature, it makes sense to respond to the variability of our climate. Working at a small-scale reduces risk and allows for adaptability.

Small scale flour mills like those owned and run by Fresh Flour in Devon and The Field bakery in Somerset are inexpensive to set up and allow experimentation and adjustment. These businesses work with different grains to produce pasta and bread from locally grown, unusual flours that taste different and delicious. Eating and experiencing this food is an enjoyable and memorable experience.

In ‘Tools for Conviviality” Ivan Illich describes a need for society to enable conviviality, relationships, and energy use at a human-scale. In ‘Small is Beautiful’, also published in 1973, EF Schumacher asks for cheap, small-scale methods compatible with the human need for creativity, with the cost of any machine in balance with the wage it is possible to earn from it. Production should be owned by workers developing relationships and products at a human-scale. Work should not only be understood through the lens of capital and rationality but through providing a life worth living.

Schumacher also states that small-scale operations, no matter how numerous, will always be less harmful to the environment than large scale ones. These are fairly simple concepts, generally ignored due to profit prioritisation, but difficult to dispute in relation to human and planetary thriving.

Fantasy Fibre Mill develop small-scale, inexpensive, textile processing machinery to enable to the production of linen textiles in the UK. Nick Evans, a Director/Inventor recently supported Brigitte Kaltenbacher, a community flax organiser and weaver, by spinning yarn from communally grown flax so that Brigette could weave a linen jean. The cloth produced by Nick and Brigitte has a character not found in a standard jean, they worked together, iteratively adjusting the yarn to be woven into an item of clothing that contains the input, love and learnings from many people.

Crafting textiles by hand is an enjoyable but VERY, slow process requiring multiple artisanal skills. The help of machines is required to make any decent amount of cloth. The flax to linen machinery, developed by Fantasy Fibre Mill, consists of a breaker, scutcher, hackler and spinning machine. It can be put together using easily available, inexpensive parts. This human-scale supply line will be operated by 1 person with some energetic support. Although the system is not quite ready to produce enough yarn for more than a small sample at present it is evolving and improving every day through the personal dedication of Nick and a collaborative support network of fellow enthusiasts.

In textiles, we are looking for a sweet spot that reduces the time, and cost involved in making by hand and retains a creative, adaptable, less harmful process. As Illich states, ‘convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision'.

Illich’s musings have inspired many modern communicators and scholars of the commons. I recently had the pleasure to speak at ‘Conviviality, culture and the commons’, the inaugural Schumacher College ‘Wild’ event since their divorce from the Dartington Estate. I shared how commoning informs my work and how it shapes collectively caring for social networks, knowledge, cultural practices and resources which are shared for the benefit of everyone.

In its simplest form, commoning is an activation of community, it begins with field building; learning and developing relationships with people. This is how South West Grain Network’s work with grain and bread started, it’s how the Bast Fibre Network - a group I convene around the subject of flax and hemp - began. People meet, talk about a problem, and as they develop convivial relationships, trust develops, and things happen together.

Like the South West Grain Network is developing bread in different ways, the South West England Textile Commons seeks to develop textiles through embracing difference, incorporating diversity and developing the flexible systems and process to allow for this. Stewarded by myself (Liflad), South West England Fibreshed, Wessex Community Assets and Fantasy Fibre Mill and involving with many other collaborators such as Flaxland, Transition Town Totnes and The Flax Project Plymouth, our project is figuring out a more convivial process to grow flax, produce linen and other related materials within our local context.

The methods we develop will be mindful and able to respond to what is grown in a particular year. The tools used will be inexpensive to construct and enjoyable to use, operating using minimal energy. Perhaps the textile producer will grow the raw materials and dyes, process them when the sun shines, stitch and weave in the winter and sell the outputs within a cyclical, seasonal, community supported system.

In traditional business, an entrepreneur is encouraged to network and develop relationships with the aim of raising investment. With the South West Textile Commons we use the frame of commoning to raise and share funding as a collective, undertaking a similar process underpinned by completely different values.

We hope that a cooperative ecosystem, feeding multiple enterprises will ultimately emerge involving distributed decision making, distributed resources and distributed benefits. Learning together, experimenting, researching, testing, sharing innovations and adventures across South West England working towards our aim of supporting land-based bioregional livelihoods centred around textiles and related natural materials. We don’t know the details yet but are collectively working this out, at the speed of trust, taking small but steady steps.

Diversity in production will not ‘make us money’ because it will always take more time, however, if we work together, it may become possible to earn a living. In these turbulent times, we need to steadfastly embrace diversity. Small scale, bioregional, clothing commons can facilitate this through flexibility of process and outcome - through the seeds that are planted, crops that are grown and products created convivially and creatively in community.

Resources:

https://www.swtextilecommons.uk/

https://www.southwestgrainnetwork.co.uk/

https://www.bastfibrecommons.org/2025/04/02/community-led-textile-resilience-in-southeast-england/

We forget that the origin story of our fashion and clothing systems involves fibre being grown alongside food by ordinary people everywhere. In the UK, before the enclosures of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, most peasant families grew flax, hemp, wool on common land and made their own clothing at home. Just as people grew vegetables and fished, they also grew fibre to weave into a sack-like cloth that they wore with wool and leather outer garments.

History of Flax and Hemp in the UK

Bast fibres, flax and industrial hemp, are annual flowering plants and their stalks contain fibres. They are easy to grow in temperate climates and can be transformed into cloth through several well-established stages. Flax is derived from the Mediterranean and hemp from Asia but both have been commonly grown in the UK for thousands of years. We grow very little of either crop now. Hemp fibre was traditionally used for rope, canvas, sail cloth and paper and flax fibre was made into linen for clothing and tableware.

The UK lost much of its indigenous textile knowledge hundreds of years ago with its early advancement of industrialisation and colonisation. However, it is fascinating to read the history of flax and hemp production because it waxed and waned even before the industrial revolution and the intense competition that the cotton trade brought in the late 18th century.

In 1535 Henry VIII made the cultivation of flax or hemp obligatory and all holders of arable land had to grow a quarter of an acre for every 60 acres or be fined. However, by the early 18^th century production had declined in the face of cheaper imports of European flax.

There were attempts to revive production in the late 19^th century but by then the UK had lost too much knowledge to be competitive. There was a gallant revival attempt in 1994 by the Bioregional Development Group, but it failed with the most likely cause being that garment production was heading rapidly towards cheaper production in China.

Flax and hemp can be part of agro-ecological crop rotations while creating valuable and useful outputs beyond just textiles such as food, building materials, paper and bio composites. Flax is the starting material for linen. It is easier for communities to work with due to its smaller size of around 1m rather than 3m tall like hemp. Hemp is interesting because it can more easily provide multiple different products and revenue streams and is more adaptive and resilient to climate change.

In the UK, many organisations have already emerged to sell agroecologically produced food at the local level. Examples include the Apricot Centre in Devon, which grows biodynamic organic food, distributed through local markets and a vegetable delivery service, while also being an agroecological education centre, teaching regenerative farming practices, and providing mental wellbeing services. All these services complement and support a diverse and sustainable farm. Could fibre farming be added into this mix to build this type of economic mode further?

There are signs that this is possible with projects developing around the world. TapRoot Farm in Nova Scotia, Canada has an organic vegetable box delivery scheme, grows arable crops and is also creating an ecosystem for textiles in Nova Scotia.  TapRoot Fibre, has invested in wool and linen-processing equipment supporting the local fibre community, even going as far as developing its own farm-scale processing machinery. This has allowed other smaller farms and small-holdings around them to diversify their own outputs, creating revenue and natural goods from more than just food.

Les Chanvres de l’Atlantique, in Saint-Geours-de-Maremne, Southwest France, grows organic hemp and over the past decade has enacted a plan to integrate food production, building materials and textiles. In a hemp building it started with food production and developed an innovative, low-energy cold store for seeds. It manufactures hemp oil, seed products and hempfu (tofu) as well as hemp tea. It developed hemp building bricks alongside the food products which went to market and created revenue. The company spent five years researching the textile process before creating its own made-in-France fabrics.

The company now has three revenue streams and markets from the same plant. All outputs demand slightly different timing and management but in a holistic, vertically integrated economic system they can work well together. A system like this, at the medium scale they are working to, requires deep pockets and patient investment but promises to make economic sense over the long term and to build local resilience through providing jobs and care for the land.

However, producing fibre from seed to then produce garments is a much longer and more challenging process than producing food as this diagram demonstrates:

Some are still willing to take on this challenge. Inspired by the ethos of maker spaces, where people make experimental items, Rosie Bristow and Nick Evans at the Fantasy Fibre Mill in Scotland run a prototype microbusiness designing and building easy-to-assemble textile processing equipment to turn raw fibre into yarn under one roof. When it is fully developed, Fantasy Fibre Mill will produce yarn and its flax processing and spinning equipment will be available as open-source plans.

The enterprise anticipates that it will make additional revenue through consultancy fees, helping other growers and makers set up low-cost textile processing equipment in their own localities. Luckily there are groups such as Fibershed who are working to help progress and fund this development process.

Funding the Fibre Transition

A global movement of regional initiatives, Fibershed, works against prevailing practice and dominant economics, to rebuild local, equitable textile and clothing systems based on agroecological farming and soil-to-soil production. It is supporting fibre farms through funding and a distributed network, while educating the public about the damaging consequences of our existing clothing system. It is communicating that regionally-based textile systems offer material diversity and deep flows of value, beyond monetary, to the land, animals and people who live there. 

A big conversation in the Fibreshed movement relates to raising capital for processing machinery that takes raw material to finished yarn. This may cost from £10,000-20,000 for a micro mill, more than £150,000-300,000 for a mini-mill and £5m-50m for industrial-scale mills. Many of the difficulties of textile-production economics stem from the discontinuation of US and EU subsidy systems. The hope is that this catalytic funding will help bring in wealth from other sources and perhaps ultimately lead to the US subsidising its textile manufacturing again.

Wool and leather are also by-products of food production, but this often gets forgotten. Wool fleeces end up in waste streams and are not currently valued as a co-product or crop. New York-based designer and co-founder of Fibershed NY Laura Sansone, is adding more value to wool and alpaca fleece by sharing the costs, risks and administration of its development into yarn. The Carbon Farm Network is a cooperative of designers who create bioregional yarns, processed within the local area, accredited through a carbon management scheme and managed by a decentralised Holochain App – an open-source framework for building fully distributed, peer-to-peer applications. Laura designed the system to make visible the value that local textiles can bring to a region.

Bioregional Demonstration Products

To add strength and grassroots support for these new systems, another opportunity lies with bioregional demonstration products. These are fun, tangible items with a story, grown and made in a place that can be held, worn or shared by those within a community. At House of Design, in Groningen, Netherlands, Eileen Blackmore has created multiple, local, natural-material products such as toy-like linen animal souvenirs and historically inspired modern sweaters made from locally grown flax and wool.

A Former database specialist turned ecological designer, Eileen has been working with sustainable materials for over a decade. She is involved in many important projects in her region from plastic waste prevention at Wad Wad Van Waarde to expanding the cultivation of flax and transforming vocational education. These are all interconnected activities in a holistic systems view. Eileen stresses the importance of seeding the potential of a product in the community you want to engage with.

She started with small souvenirs to tell the story of Dutch flax and linen at a design festival. People bought small linen sheep, cows and horse toys made from Dutch-grown (not made) linen. This method puts materials on the map which helps to create larger markets and investment in the infrastructure needed to complete the production lifecycle over the long term. Eileen also works with local vocational colleges and has put hand processing of flax onto the curriculum so that students gain an appreciation of the hard work that material processing requires. The products she has made create pride in the region and young and old, rural and urban, people can see and feel the reasons for making natural products in their region.

Nathalie Revol of Lin et Chanvre Bio spent five years galvanising farmers, processors and textile producers to ultimately create 200m of hemp cloth grown and made in France. Working with a jeans manufacturer within the network, they created 100 pairs of hemp jeans to distribute among all those who worked on the project and to give to key players, such as the Mayor of Normandy, to help them understand the value of such a product.

Consultants can write the best reports and give well-designed presentations, but there is something incredibly effective about a real item with emotional and physical value that embodies the essence of a collective dream. It was endearing to see the members of Lin et Chanvre Bio proudly wearing the hemp jeans they created together. The purpose of making products can be so much more than making a profit.

Clothing can relate immediately to a place, its people, history and culture and can embody relational value and inspiration. When worn by local stakeholders these hemp jeans products inspire conversation, connection and regional pride that provides immense value beyond the financial.

Turning fashion around from its extractive and destructive present to a future in local relational supply networks making products with meaning will be a tough task. However, radical transformation is possible, and I believe it will come from the entirely different frame of situating fibre and fashion within local food production systems, centred around collaboration.

From there value can be distributed; risks and revenue can be shared; and aligned purposes can manage the mitigation of any ecological consequences. Fibre and food can work together from an ecosystems viewpoint but there is also synergy around collaboration and routes to market that can provide an alternative to our existing destructive system.

As many of you know, I’ve recently returned from a 4-week journey around Europe funded by a Churchill Fellowship. I connected with many purpose-led people who believe in localised linen, hemp and wool production and in developing cloth from local soil with local toil in bioregional textile systems. In this article I share snippets of my journey and give an intro into the realities of bast fibre textiles production. A more detailed report for the Churchill Foundation will follow soon. Much of the research felt like detective work. One of the many stumbling blocks to creating localised, UK fibre is the small-scale machinery needed to help with processing the raw plant material into practical value such as insulation, growing medium or textile yarn. Through Netherlands, France, Switzerland and Spain, I explored cultural, social and physical infrastructure, investigating existing equipment and process to consider what needs collaboratively developing to support farm scale, localised fibre production. It was an enjoyable and fulfilling journey, involving many amazing people. Talking in person, exploring problems face to face, felt like such a privilege and I am immensely grateful for the opportunity.

The fashion farm

After crossing the channel in a packed Eurostar, my quest began in the Netherlands. Looking from the train window, at the flat expanse of carefully manicured farmland crisscrossed by waterways, I wondered how long this land will continue to be habitable. Dutch people will continue to adapt with indigenous ingenuity but at what cost and for how long? Surrounded by flood plains full of water and baron fields, it was joyful to visit a fledging fashion farm brought to life by designer Joline Jolink and her partner Peter Feldbrugge. With only 1 hectare of land, a compact farmhouse, multiple out buildings, a pond, 3 sheep, 5 chickens, an orchard and a perfectly formed BNB and studio space, they are making their dream a reality and over time will explore the potential of growing clothing. In a meeting of minds conversation, Joline observed that one of the most surprising things about moving from Rotterdam into a rural landscape was how friendly and receptive her neighbours are. Although conventional farmers, they love what she is doing and are surprisingly supportive of her plans to renovate a large barn and inviting the public in to experience the craft and graft of seed to cloth production. Later in France I saw some startling farmer protests and in these times of political conflict cross Europe it’s foundational to develop these diverse and critical friendships.

Flax growing

Moving on to more practical knowledge, the first step in fibre production is to figure out how to grow the plants. Ofcourse this is context and place specific, but a lot of know-how is transferable within similar climates. I stayed on another inspiring farm in Normandy, France. This time a mixed-use organic dairy and arable farm of 120ha situated in the most famous flax growing region in the world. Silt soil - limon en francais -  means that flax roots go deep and the plant grows tall and straight. As a result of this good fortune Normandy produces 55% of the global crop. However, climate change means that ideal growing conditions might be moving north towards the UK. We won’t have the same soil unfortunately, but we can grow a decent enough crop as evidenced by history (previously flax was grown everywhere in the UK) and recent small-scale experiments.

Retting

Post-harvest, Flax requires retting (rotting), in some places this is completed in tanks but in France ‘dew retting’ takes place in the field over 3-6 weeks. Retting requires intermittent light rain and sunshine to create the right microbial conditions for perfect fibre quality to develop. Joris Soenen and Pauline Laurent have an organic farm with pasture (dairy cows/meat) flax, wheat, oats, barley and cover crops in an 8 paddock, 80 ha rotation. The rotation always creates 5 years of pasture and during that time the soil is untouched and the seeds of weeds have time to die in the soil. Flax always has issues with weeds and they must be kept out of the fibre crop as it devalues the end product. Although it requires a 10-year plan, this rotational system works very well and the farm is ecological and profitable. Out in the loamy field, I met tiny, winter flax babies growing on the best Normandy soil. This time was brief, due to the inconvenient fact of winter, but it was one of the highlights of my trip. Innovative farmers like Joris are starting to plant winter flax in November to harvest in June, to balance the risk of spring flax failing if the weather is too dry in late summer. This is climate adaptation in action. Potential consequences can mean a slight downgrade in fibre quality and it’s becoming ever more difficult to produce the qualities of flax that the market is used to, what was rejected 20 years ago as low grade is now considered good.

Scutching

Once the retting is complete, easier said than done as it requires an art of timing and experience to perfect, the flax is dried, bailed and transported to a nearby scutching mill. There are many of these units in Normandy but none at all in the UK. Our last flax mills closed in the 1950’s but these were a temporary war measure and most of our linen industry was gone long. Scutching first involves breaking, the crimping of the retted plant through geared wheels, then scutching, where blades bash the fibre in a circular flow to remove all the shives (the woody outer core) then finally hackling, where the fibre is drawn through a series of progressively narrowing combs to produce a smooth, blonde, ponytail bundle of flax. (The term flaxen hair makes sense once you’ve experienced this!) Scutching facilities are abundant in Normandy and Belgium but they are rare in many European locations and lie at the root of why new linen production is difficult. An industrial scale plant costs between 5-15 million Euros to set up, will service 1000-3000ha of land that has the potential for millions of pairs of jeans.

Spinning

Key to all textile systems is spun yarn and so scutched flax is taken in bundles to a spinning plant. It’s not easy to stay in business since 1778 but Safilin has succeeded against the odds. I visited charismatic innovation director, Adolfo Mandato at their spinning mill in Bethune. Adolfo talked through the machinery and process, patiently relaying information including how wet and dry spinning have fixed operational environments, how wet spinning has to stay at 70-78% humidity and 22-25 degrees Celsius and how the quality of linen is reducing year on year due to climate change.

At the other end of the production scale, Pierre Ouagne, Professor at the École Nationale D’Ingenieurs De Tarbes, put together a small-scale spinning facility for linen and hemp that also has scutching capability. It was thrilling to see the full process in action from raw plant to final yarn under one roof. I particularly enjoyed the scutching machines from Taproot Fibre, developed by flax pioneer, Patricia Bishop in Nova Scotia, Canada, and will write more about this another time. Pierre is doing excellent work, driven by his wider ecological values, to support local French production and with the help of a supportive University Director has created a valuable small-scale set-up. Although rare, small spinning machines do exist, and this means that local production IS possible. Finding the capital to bring it all together is another matter, but we will cross that bridge another time.

Many people in France are ignorant of the ecological benefits of linen and shockingly this includes home-grown luxury brands who apparently do not wish to pay more than Zara or H&M for their yarn. I now have a fantastic overview of the processes that create the finest linen and the differences in yarn prepping for knitting or weaving. In Gouda, I learned from LCA expert, Nathalie van der Velden, that the finer the yarn, the higher the energy use and that knitted cloth uses much less energy than woven cloth. I’d never considered this before but it’s obvious once noted. A thicker yarn may use more material, but the work required to make it finer demands a repetition of process using energy, heat, water and often chemical applications. Hundreds of years ago peasants and lower classes wore cheaper, rougher cloth and the finer textiles were reserved for the rich and powerful. Clothing used to be a very visible demonstration of wealth that’s harder to discern in present times as cloth became so cheap to produce. A likely future enquiry could be to explore if people are willing to consider more rustic versions of textiles if they are local and ecologically produced.

And what about hemp?

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It is said, by many an advocate, that hemp can work at the landscape scale to provide many of our basic human needs from food to shelter and clothing. Easily outcompeting weeds it’s a more resilient crop than flax and some say it’s easier to grow in an increasingly volatile climate. Hemp can provide much of what we humans need to survive whilst doing less harm than our existing industrial systems, but it doesn’t suit the capitalist narrative of technology leading growth to return to a simpler system. It’s easy to see many benefits for the living world if we redesign our systems to work with this extraordinary plant. The case for hemp and building materials is very clear as they’re easier to process and make but I am also coming round to the possibilities for textiles.

At Les Chanvres de l'Atlantique, in Saint-Geours-de-Maremne, Southwest France, they have an ambitious plan to utilise all aspects of hemp fibre from food to building materials and cloth. All require slightly different and carefully planned growing, harvesting and processing but in a holistic system they can work well together. Vincent Lartizian, and his co-directors of the brand Nunti Sunya, are creating a different kind of business. Geographically distanced from the main bast fibre action in Normandy they are forging their own path. They start with the hemp plant itself and build corresponding relationships carefully with the land, seasons, climate and organic farmers outwards from this. This care and attention is paramount if the entire system is to thrive. I broke my no new fashion purchasing rule and bought one of their beautiful hemp sweaters of knitted jersey. (I’ve recently developed a new clothing purchasing rule that it’s ok if I trust the person who made it). Martin Klöti works from a traditional Swiss barn in a very steep but pretty valley one hour’s travel outside Zurich. Like Vincent, Martin is a sustainability pioneer who believes he’s found an answer to many of our problems with industrial hemp. Whilst decorticating hemp using hand tools, Martin and I discussed that it is not Marxist or Communist to imagine a sustainable world for all, it’s a common-sense paradigm that, with the right attitude, could be developed outside of market and state.

Cooperative Commons

Virgo Coop, another inspiring hemp producer in Cahors, is using stakeholder and worker coops to progress collaboration and mutual benefit between farmers, builders, mills and weavers. A philosophy supported by a wonderful organisation called Lin et Chanvre Bio (organic linen and hemp association) who organise knowledge exchange, meetups, and lobbying in support of an organic system. The French like to work in coops and the development of the ‘social solidarity economy’ is supported by the ‘Minister for the Ecological and Solidarity Transition’ - a spectacular ministerial title that I hope the next UK government has the confidence to emulate! Flax and hemp can support wider bioregional outputs and we have an opportunity to develop our fledgling fibre systems using a new mindset and methods. We can create conditions of emergence for a democratic, cooperative, commons-based, ecological clothing culture. To achieve this, international knowledge exchange will be sought alongside local experimentation. With determination, cooperation, and careful planning, new fibre systems will be possible. Watch this space….

As I write this note, I am about to embark on a month long journey around Europe researching small scale, bioregional textile processing and the collaborative governance and distributive finance that will support such initiatives. Supported by a Churchill Fellowship, I will be meeting a wide range of amazing people from farmers, to designers, academics, entrepreneurs and co-operatives. As I sit on the Eurostar, I want to share the dream that underpins this trip. I wrote this essay at Schumacher College, Dartington, an institution currently in great peril. The dream emerged from the transformative environment nurtured by Satish Kumar and the amazing staff who teach there. I am sharing these words with gratitude and hope for the future.  

‘If change is to come, it will have to come from the margins.’ Wendell Berry

‘The small farmer is the last free person on this planet’  Vandana Shiva

‘Even though the idea of the small farm future is currently marginal to mainstream thought, it’s probably the best future now available’ Chris Smaje

I have a dream to run a small fashion farm. Situated in the rolling English hills of South Devon, an 18^th Century, slightly shabby farmhouse, nestles on the edge of a vibrant village. Retrofit with natural materials, furnished with ground source heat, solar PV and a hemp glazed extension to let in light and rural views, the building is practical and beautiful. A sheltered south facing garden grows vegetables and flowers following permaculture and biodynamic principles. Chickens roam between an orchard and dye garden. Timber and stone farm buildings are used for practical and educational activities. Beyond the farmyard sits 20 acres of mixed-use agricultural land suitable for both arable crops and grazing stock. At the furthest edges of the farm lies a stream and an ancient woodland brimming with life. Organic flax to make linen is grown in rotation with heritage wheat, grains and pulses. Wool will be hand sheared from a few sweet natured Dorset Down sheep, regeneratively grazing in rotation on pasture and woodland. Nettles from the fringes will be harvested to create an experimental yarn. Mulberry Trees will be planted to give additional nutrients to grazing sheep but mainly to produce peace silk through feeding tiny silkworms. People will flock to the farm to learn about soil-to-soil systems and ancient artisanal skills, assisted with considered technology such as 3D printed spinning wheels and cycle powered machines. Eyes would be opened wide to the time, energy and extensive knowledge needed to make local, natural clothing through methods of processing, spinning and weaving cloth. Idyllic and educational it will lay bare the realities of making nature-centric clothing.

The Fashion Farm. A jarring and unconventional phrase. A farm conjures bucolic imagery of cows, tractors, wellies and golden wheatfields but can often be industrialised and grim. Fashion expresses the prevailing styles of dress, defined by western modernity and something the industry self-determines through a nebulous constellation of marketing interventions. To create ‘fashion’, a process that once took years now takes days through the speed of technology and the power of social media. Fashion and farming industries are connected through material production, unfair supply chains and unhealthy consumption. Both sectors are key players in our destructive industrialised systems, causing much soul searching and exploration of alternatives among participants. Both sectors directly reflect the values of our society.

Along with food and shelter, clothing is also a human need. With the dream of the fashion farm, I want people to talk of local fibre production in the same breath as local food. Although we are massively over producing clothing at present, it important we learn how to transform our systems of production. It is vital we become more in tune with the land, using fibre and food to connect and begin to place the needs of our beyond-human-kin in better balance with our own. A network of local production capacity for life’s necessities will also enable future community resilience. Less than 30% of a plant such as hemp or flax is needed for textile fibre and the remaining material can be used to make oils, building materials and even composite materials such as wind turbine blades and surfboards. A locally based food and fibre system will provide security against the increasing risk of global systems collapse. It will keep us safe, repair our soils and our souls. This slow and deliberate nature of production will prevent the excesses of consumption and the unhealthy thoughts and feelings that fashion can bring. I believe the fashion farm to be an adaptive process in which participants prepare for a more resilient society without jeopardising the needs of life’s future generations. It will coexist within a bioregional, relational ecosystem of small-scale, land related activities supporting regenerative livelihoods.

Flax, one of the easiest fibre crops to grow, is currently cultivated across vast swathes of northern France and Belgium. Ideal growing conditions are moving up into the UK thanks to climate change but it’s possible to grow it in many places. Historically the UK and Ireland grew flax and hemp in almost every town and village, but the off-shoring of textile production and the popularity of cotton killed off this practice by the 1950’s. Textile and garment production is highly labour intensive, costly and time consuming, a driver of the industrial revolution - a fact long forgotten and removed from view. The high value of cotton, the transfer of textile production from India to the UK and US slavery provided the bulk of finance for British colonisation, therefore supporting UK textile sufficiency has a wider decolonial narrative. The home of the industrial revolution, the instigator of an unsustainable system should retreat from extraction and revitalise a new home-grown output and perhaps the UK has a moral duty to become self-sufficient. Some worry that on-shoring production of clothing will disproportionately affect the poorer regions of the world by removing huge numbers of jobs in factories and on farms. This is a valid concern and care must be taken of the world’s clothing producers. However, if developed with care, any new local system will take many decades to impact textile production elsewhere. If we continue to use cotton, we must ensure it comes from fairly traded supply chains using regenerative methods and ecological transport. It’s difficult to predict the future but climate change is already reducing productive areas for growing food. Continuing to outsource textile and clothing production to poorer nations, when their arable land is becoming increasing scarce, feels highly unethical and it is a complex economic question to be explored.

Even with climate change it will not be possible to grow cotton in the UK but bast fibres such as flax, hemp and nettles grow abundantly and sheep reside in their millions, with wool underutilised and almost worthless in economic value. On my dream farm, I’d create a diverse, abundant system carrying a wide range of plant types and varieties to protect against changes in climate, drought and disease. In making steps towards local fibre production, it is important to understand the context in which this will happen. Food sovereignty and sufficiency is live in current discourse, but fibre production is entirely missing from UK land-use strategies and agricultural white papers. Using well considered estimates and land-use strategy reports I roughly calculated that if we reduced our new clothing requirements to around 5 new garments per year (a low but workable amount) we could grow textiles for everyone in the UK using only 6-7% of available arable land. It helps to understand this figure with the comparison that we consume hundreds of kilos of vegetables, nuts, cereals, meat and dairy every year to stay alive but the kilo equivalent for textiles will be tiny in comparison. Bast fibres can be stored indefinitely - flax, grown and processed well generates a yield of 300-400 kg of textile fibre per acre. To make 5 garments from linen requires less than 10 kilos of processed flax. It’s relatively easy for farmers to make space for occasional fibre crops within a 7-year rotation. What’s preventing this is a lack of processing infrastructure - the machinery, supply chains, routes-to-market and knowledge - not a lack of interest on the part of farmers and designers.

It is entirely possible to realise local textile production with work and commitment from a multitude of people with green fingers, technical acumen, patience, and creativity. It’s a vision shared by many, from those determinedly growing fibres despite the difficulties, disillusioned designers developing new systems, makers scraping a living and wearers working out new relationships with their clothing. It’s a project too big for one person. Aside from the simple fact I couldn’t afford to buy the farm I describe, is it right for one person to own so much land? The steps towards creating UK textile sufficiency will require rethinking and dismantling many different capitalist systems. It will require new relationships to land and figuring out innovative systems of exchange and finance. It requires new small-scale on farm machinery and process. A future fashion farm could help establish a dynamic clothing commons; creating products locally but sharing knowledge digitally so that similar localities can adapt and evolve process, plans and technique. It will require collective endeavour and creative enterprise. Building a shared culture around what it means to grow, own and wear clothing produced locally will help us consider more deeply what we want our clothing to reflect. We will be directly connected to the land through what lies next to our skin, there is no better story than that. Situated within a bioregion populated by a multitude of small-scale nested ecosystems that grow food and create useful materials alongside textile fibres the fashion farm will require integration into wider production systems and seasons. It will require learning to be we not I. This dream is too big for one person and a single farm, it is something we must manifest together.

References and further reading:

Image: Devon Farm by Craig Cameron on Unsplash.

Smaje, C. (2020). A small farm future: making the case for a society built around local economies, self-provisioning, agricultural diversity, and a shared earth. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.

Thanhauser, S. (2022). Worn: a people’s history of clothing. UK USA Canada Ireland Australia India New Zealand South Africa: Allen Lane an imprint of Penguin Books.

Fairlie, S. (2010). Meat: a benign extravagance, 1st ed. East Meon : White River Junction, VT: Permanent Pub. ; Distributed in the USA by Chelsea Green Pub. Co.

I fell in love with fashion at a young age but we’ve had a tumultuous relationship over the years. This article explores this relationship, dips into my personal life and professional background and articulates the responses I’m developing. I had the pleasure and privilege to grow up in a Christian family with ethical values and an open minded, progressive outlook. My father was a pioneer of fairtrade and ethical business and our house was full of indigenous crafts and visitors from around the world. As a young child, I loved the exotic dolls and mangos brought back in my Dad’s suitcase but rebelled against going to church and what I viewed as hippy, alternative culture. I fell in love with fashion of the French variety. Embodied by a glamorous grandma, this meant tantrums about ugly school shoes and secret purchases of high heels, jewel coloured, swirling, shiny skirts and fluffy mohair jumpers. I knew this was morally ‘wrong’ but followed my heart by making clothing and studying fashion design in the early 90’s.

As often happens, the virtue instilled in me from childhood returned towards the end of my degree. I designed one of the first sustainable student collections sponsored by pioneering textile companies developing organic alternatives. I wrote a dissertation called “Fashion and the Environment' with a conclusion that ‘Green Fashion’ was unfortunately a momentary trend not taken seriously by the industry. I presciently stated it would take time for this to happen. Fast forward almost thirty years and the change the industry needs is still not happening, in fact the situation is exponentially worse. We evolved to ‘Sustainable Fashion’ in the 2000’s and to ‘Regenerative Fashion’ today but with little discernible effect on consumption volumes.

The Earth Logic pamphlet, written in 2019 by Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham, was a clarion call to fashion industry practitioners to find ways to guide fashion away from the current growth logic paradigm. Using a systems approach they champion a diverse, care-centred response to encourage the creation of multiple centres of fashion activity using plural ways of knowing, co-creation and grounded imagination. Disappointingly, no policy changes, voluntary improvements or industry dialogue have had a measurable effect in reducing total consumption in the years since the paper was published.

I am not the only person wondering what is causing this and what we can do about it. In answer to the growing concern of her own her own conscience, Sandra Niessen, anthropologist and fashion activist, wrote a seminal paper in 2020, titled ‘Fashion it’s Sacrifice Zone, and Sustainability’. As an academic sitting outside the industry, she was able to write a blistering attack as she introduced the concept that non-western ‘Other’ traditions are the sacrifice zones of western fashion. Niessen suggests that indigenous clothing cultures, alongside geographical landscapes, have been destroyed by the advance of globalisation and the ubiquitous availability of cheap, homogeneous, western clothing. When I first read this, it lifted scales from my eyes. Everything about fashion is ‘othering’ and making those not ‘in fashion’ outsiders. Niessen argues that only by recognising and correcting systemic ethnic bias and eliminating sacrifice zones can the fashion industry achieve sustainability. As the late David Graeber points out, it is worth remembering that a multitude of cultures, societal organisation, interpersonal ways of being, skills, arts and crafts have existed for 250,000 years. Western modernity, imperialism and colonisation have obliterated so much culture, skill and knowledge of immense value in such a short time.

The fashion industry appears to be trying to change but it seems the relentless onward motion of modernity and economic pressures of capitalism are preventing this. Circular systems, regulation, legislation, renting, recycling, none of this is working. I could break this down in detail but trust me when I say that in 2023, the state of play is much worse and evidenced through the ever increasing production of fast fashion and its resultant waste. The uncomfortable fact remains that despite a huge volume of ‘sustainable’ initiatives, garment sales volumes continue to increase year on year.

Inspired by the work of Jason Hickel and the Degrowth movement, the activist group, Fashion Act Now (of which I am a member) co-created the term Defashion to describe the dismantling of the fashion system, something we feel needs to happen urgently. We would like to replace it with a pluriverse of local, culturally relevant systems that respect values other than money. Defashion describes a paradigmatic shift where indigenous and non-fashion dress systems are cherished and where communities come together to create local clothing culture and the Big Fashion Industry is removed. Defashion is degrowth through process and care and bringing this into being is key to the work of fashion activists like myself, Sandra Niessen and many others.

As a society, we must learn to dress respectfully and empathetically, celebrating our personalities, our cultures and our connections to nature. It doesn't mean we can’t enjoy clothing but we must acknowledge the symbolism and the ecological consequences of our choices. No-body appears to be listening to the urgent call of the earth. One of the key questions of our time is how to spread care-centred, ecological messages more widely, putting nature at the heart of decision making and bringing a new culture into being.

Philosopher David Abram talks of a perception shift of humans away from nature, that the written word has removed our connection to the natural world. Nora Bateson, filmmaker and educator, speaks of the perception shift needed to bring us back. She argues we cannot change ourselves and society until we have a shift in mindset and de-centre humanity. Contrary to assertions, this cannot be changed by design and people must come to it themselves. De-centring requires mentally placing ourselves at the heart of our environments and as Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti states in Hospicing Modernity, we must become in-tune with all living beings around us.

I identify as a Designer, although I haven’t worked in design for many years. I used to constantly observe the environment around me from an extractive perspective; mentally criticising people, places and clothing to create a continuous iterative cycle of hoped-for product improvement. In the distant past, I worked for big brands like Adidas. A designer of sportswear must problem solve and gather technical data through wear testing to enable decision making that creates a better performing product for consumption. As a fashion Educator, I observed many an unkind, unsaid critique of others’ garment choices, communicated via a raised eyebrow, a smug reference of belonging to a club; a continual mental dialogue that takes us away from being in the moment and seeing what really matters. Recently I noticed a change in myself. I am much less critical, less judgemental, and more objective about products, places and people. I like to think I don’t care what people wear or how they look when it used to feel important. How did I get to this shift? Could it be more time spent in nature or an involvement in land, food and regenerative agriculture? Is it an extensive education in regenerative economics and ecological thinking? Has it emerged from a greater understanding of our economic system and the role of western modernity as a dominant destructive force? Or is it through an education involving spiritual and ecological journeys, learning from indigenous ways of being and our terrible history of colonisation? Most likely it's all of this combined.

I have come to the view that a transformative, earth-centric mindset is what people must nourish rather than attempting to fix a broken industry. If we want Fashion to slow and degrow then we must all play our parts. We have to learn to let go. We all wear clothing and the plurality of our backgrounds and cultures will mean that all our reactions around the globe will be and should be different. My agency is to stop buying new, to disengage with what is considered ‘fashionable’ and to develop textiles locally from the land. I love clothing and the personal expression it brings but fashion is a mirror on society and we must recognise what it is reflecting. We cannot wait for governments or corporations to change the situation. I invite everyone to examine their wardrobes and their own perspectives, to develop unique ways forward and tentatively build a new clothing culture. This may seem difficult or even impossible but what is fashionable starts in the mind, something that is within all our power.

Further info:

Abram, D. (1996). The spell of the sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world, 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books.

Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Allen Lane, 2021.

Fletcher, K. and Tham, M. (2019), Earth Logic: Fashion Action Research Plan, London: J.J. Charitable Trust, https://earthlogic.info

Hickel, Jason. Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. Penguin Books, 2022.

Niessen, S. (2020). Fashion, its Sacrifice Zone, and Sustainability. Fashion Theory, 24 (6), 859–877. Available from https://doi.org/10.1080/1362704X.2020.1800984

Niessen, Sandra. ‘Defining Defashion: A Manifesto for Degrowth’. International Journal of Fashion Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, Oct. 2022, pp. 439–44. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1386/infs_00082_7.

https://batesoninstitute.org/nora-bateson/

Let’s start with the name. Liflad means ‘course of life’ in Old English, it evolved into livelode, the ‘means of keeping alive’ which in turn became livelihood. A similar evolution can be found in Old High German in libleita meaning ‘provisions.’ (I have to thank for the inspiration here). We need to re-think what livelihood means and with my background as a fashion designer I am coming at it via that lens. Our material culture is grounded in the objects and architecture that we provision for ourselves. The fashions we display though our clothing and houses are a mirror on society and much of what we produce is not fundamental in supporting our basic human needs, health or happiness. I have been contemplating sustainable fashion for over 25 years. In that time the consumption of clothing and other resource intensive materials has increased exponentially and shows no sign of slowing. 

Our current livelihoods are not fit for purpose in many ways, built around a landscape of consumption that fills a void left by our current empty culture, bereft of purpose and meaning, focused on social media, shopping and individual pleasure. Our aim with Liflad is to support and demonstrate enterprise, and I use that word carefully, that creates useful items from local resources using natural materials, agroecological methods and minimal energy. In short, we want to develop new livelihoods to provision an emerging culture; one that balances the needs of both nature and people, reflects fundamental human needs (rather than wants) whilst manifesting respect for all living beings.

The Commons underpins our approach and like a growing group of thinkers, writers, artists and educators, we have faith that small, local economies will develop through community, collaboration and a refocusing of values. We recognise that state sanctioned policies and measures required to bring our planet away from the trajectory of collapse are politically difficult to achieve from the top down. We are beginning our radical reorientation and exploring new territory regardless. To support this culture shift we also need to rethink our economic and governance systems and we will work hard to figure this out (spoiler alert - we don’t have the answers yet).

It is also key that we decolonise material production through developing our own non-extractive supply chains from our own land, on our own land. We want to gently bring others into our ecological and social perspective to enable a smoother, less chaotic transition when the realities of the polycrises hit in full force. The UK, where I am writing from, lost much of its local textile knowledge hundreds of years ago when our early advancement of industrial processes and colonisation obliterated any indigenous knowledge. Blending old and new technologies, restoring long forgotten processes and bringing this knowledge back into being, requires support. Our focus will help projects relating to the natural material supply chains of fibre, textiles and clothing.

We will collaboratively create and disseminate open-source knowledge that can be adapted to different places and contexts, connecting as many of our fellow explorers as possible. Pioneers working in the nascent home-grown fibre space need all the help they can get to survive and thrive. It is difficult to compete economically in sectors such as clothing, that outsource environmental and social costs overseas. Many practitioners we know are working from small pots of grant funding or through volunteer time but they are all driven by a vision of something better. Our first projects will provide access to technical and alternative financial information. We plan to design and pilot new methods of enterprise involving collaborative, co-operative & community finance.

Liflad will be an emergent container for creativity and practice and we are open to its development over time. We have been involved with enough (ad)ventures to understand that the thing you start out with may not be the thing you end up with. This is ok. We are dancing with possibility.

Please support us by following our journey.