Publications

The Nature of Fashion

What if the story of humanity could be told through a single thread? 

Long before we inked our thoughts onto parchment, perhaps even before we etched stories onto stone, we began spinning plant fibres. Textiles are among our earliest attempts to fashion the world around us and their history is inseparable from our own. From the first moment someone twisted and plied plants into thread, cloth became a language, an expression of the soul of the community where it was born. Threads, like words, are woven together, strands twisted into stories, each with its own unique texture. In the beginning was the cloth. 

The Nature of Fashion travels across landscapes and centuries, through myth and memory, revealing how the choices we once made continue to shape the world around us. It chronicles the plant stewards, obsessives, innovators and profiteers who have shaped what we wear today. It is the story of clashes between worlds, of voracious exploitation and silenced voices; of devotion, passion, blindness, idealism and greed. It is the story of how clothing has distanced us from nature. And also of creativity, invention, renewal and deep-rooted traditions that endure. 

Vivid, impassioned and celebratory, The Nature of Fashion is an epic sweep through the history of how we learned to create clothing with plants, revealing how textiles have transformed both the human world and our natural landscape. Fashion is at a turning point – if we are to move forward, perhaps we first need to look back?