ORGANIC PANTS, LOCALLY SOURCED
Farmer of natural dyes leads team in quest to make jeans with a conscience
Rebecca Burgess is on a quest for the perfect jeans. And by perfect, she means a good fit, but also something much deeper than that. Her denim has to have a good conscience.
Her dream pants need to be made without heavy metal-based synthetic dyes that pollute the environment, woven with non-GMO organic cotton, and constructed using materials sourced within 150 miles of her west Marin home. The garment must be handcrafted by local artists, not machines or destitute laborers in a faraway sweatshop.
It’s a tall order. So tall, she had to fill it herself by starting Fibershed — a community of Northern California farmers, ranchers and craftspeople willing to upend the textile industry with their own homestead clothing network.
In the same way that slow food guru Michael Pollan sparked early conversations about the global impact of factory food, Burgess is taking a revisionist approach to the fiber industry and offering an alternative to fast fashion. It’s possible to skip the corporate store, she said, and “grow your jeans.”
As with any harvest, it takes patience to reap the rewards.
Burgess and a team of farmers and textile artists have spent more than four years creating 20 prototype pair of bioregional five-pocket jeans, using organic cotton and dyes from indigo plants grown in Yolo County, and fabric woven on a foot-powered loom in San Francisco’s Hunters Point Shipyard. A former Levi’s designer makes the patterns and sews the jeans at his studio in Alameda.
“This all started with our war for oil,” said Burgess, 37, as she inspected indigo plants growing at a sheep and rabbit farm in Nicasio. “Eighty percent of our clothing is made of plastic — nylon, polyester and Capilene. It’s easy to make the connection between oil and fossil fuels for cars. But our clothes are made with fossil-carbon-derived aniline dyes. Still oil.”
No one in California was growing indigo in 2011 when Burgess convinced four farmers to start in Capay Valley, northwest of Sacramento, she said. Now there are 16,000 plants to provide dye for her pants.
A natural dye farmer and author of “Harvesting Color,” in 2010 Burgess vowed to wear only clothes made and dyed from plants that grew no more than 150 miles from her front door. While she admits her outfits were a tad “rustic” at first, she discovered there was no lack of fiber to create a hyperlocal wardrobe. In fact, California sheep farmers were either throwing away or sending their wool to China — 3.1 million pounds of it each year.
What was lacking was a distribution system between the fiber suppliers and the fiber artists. A little grassroots organizing and a $10,000 Kickstarter campaign later, and Burgess’ clothing experiment became a movement. She started a website to connect farmers and makers, added an online marketplace for eco-garments, and turned Fibershed into a nonprofit. Now more than 150 ranchers, farmers and artists have joined Fibershed in Northern California, and dozens more Fibershed communities have sprouted across the globe. The movement caught the attention of the North Face, which enlisted Burgess in 2014 to help them source, design and sell a $125 oatmeal-colored cotton zip-up hoodie made entirely from locally grown organic cotton. All of the nearly 2,000 jackets sold out within a month.
“There’s not a lot of talk about the poisons in our clothes, so innovation is coming from the small-scale farmers who are creating their own industry,” said Marnie Jackson, a Fibershed supplier who spins wool and angora yarns on her Black Mountain Farm sheep ranch in Nicasio.
Grow Your Jeans is Fibershed’s most ambitious project thus far. To make the jeans, a veteran organic cotton farmer in Guinda (Yolo County) sends her cotton to be ginned (cleaned of seeds) and spun into thread at a fifth generation familyowned cotton mill in North Carolina. This is the only step of the process outside the Fibershed, because there are no cotton processing factories in California.
Meanwhile, back home, the 10month natural indigo dye-making process is under way. Harvested indigo plants are stomped the same way wine grapes used to be, then put in piles to compost on a special floor made of stones, sand rice hulls and clay. The pile must be turned once a week for 100 days, then slowly fermented for about a month in water and lye made from wood ash and crushed lime.
When the dye is ready, the cotton skeins are dipped and hung to dry, slowly changing from a yellow color to dark blue. Next the spools are sent to TangleBlue in Hunters Point, where weaver Leslie Terzian Markoff uses a human-powered Macombre floor loom to create denim fabric.
Dan DiSanto, an award-winning pattern maker who has worked for Levi’s and the North Face, created the first 20 pair of Fibershed jeans in August. They are softer and springier than jeans pulled tight on industrial machines and sprayed with chemicals to retain stiffness.
Now that Burgess has her prototype jeans, she’s working on plans to scale her business and make them available to the public. Already someone has offered to sell 100,000 pair of eco-jeans, but only if Burgess can bring the price down. Right now, she estimates the jeans will need to sell for $200 to $300 to support the regional economy.
She understands that’s a high price tag, but perhaps not if taking the long view — that a pair of carefully crafted, chemical-free jeans will last three times longer than cheap factory ones.
But the fashion industry has always operated on a short view: introducing new clothes to match the season.
“We have come to believe our clothing is disposable,” said Rachel Louise Snyder, who traced the global life of a pair of jeans from the cotton fields to the factories and fashion houses for her 2007 book, “Fugitive Denim.” “But Hermès and some companies are beginning to embrace ‘slow fashion’ and the philosophy that you should make fine clothing last for four or five years. So Fibershed has a fantastic marketing angle, but the question is whether people will be willing to exchange revolving fashion for quality.”
For now, the only way to get Fibershed jeans is to win a custom pair at the Oct. 3 Grow Your Jeans event at Mann Family Farm in Bolinas.
“We used to make jeans this way and we can do it again,” Burgess said. “It will happen if we improve demand.”