Origins

The idea was initiated when Justine founded the NWEF in March 2020. To raise awareness of the Fibershed organisation and regenerative textiles, she suggested a collaboration to her friend Patrick (a well-known advocate of sustainable British fashion) just a few hundred yards from where the project was subsequently to take root.

In August, after she’d passed on a copy of the book, ‘Fibershed: Growing a Movement of Farmers, Fashion Activists and Makers for a New Textile Economy’ and a number of aligned documents including ‘The Nature of Fashion’ by the Biomimicry Institute and the ‘Earth Logic Plan’, Patrick called to accept the offer of a collaboration, asking what Justine hoped to achieve with the NWEF. Her response was to get fibre and dye crops growing in the U.K. again while developing some midscale processing equipment to make it viable.

Her suggestion was to grow indigo and linen for a denim mending kit, Patrick’s counter offer was to grow jeans!

At this time, rising awareness of the international Fibershed movement amongst the British fashion industry catalysed interest in taking textile production back to the soil in this country. Fibershed founder, Rebecca Burgess had initiated the original ‘Grow Your Jeans’ project in the USA in 2015 using locally grown cotton, so it was fitting that this collaboration sought to revive our native cellulose crop, linen, which already had thousands of years worth of almost forgotten heritage on these shores.