We’re All Wearing the Same Thing
Hint: It’s plastic and GMO cotton. In rare cases it’s not, it’s other fibers processed to feel and act like plastic and GMO cotton.
Almanacs are resources to understand how natural cycles interact with specific topics. Everything we wear comes from the Earth and is a part of natural cycles. Each month, The Mindful Designer’s Almanac offers musings about natural fibers harvested that month or season.
HEMP HARVEST
By the end of September, farmers in China’s northernmost province Heilongjiang have finished harvesting the towering hemp stalks on their fields. China is the world’s leader in hemp for fiber production and this year’s harvest was the largest in history.
Hemp currently makes up less than 0.5% of fiber for clothing and textiles. For various reasons including investment in more sustainable fibers, divestment from Chinese cotton grown in Xinjiang, and a need for more arable land for food crops, hemp is growing in popularity.
China has a five-year plan to increase hemp production to 1.3 million hectares by 2030. Currently, Chinese farmers cultivate hemp on a little over 30,000 hectares. This lofty goal is a positive when it comes to the environmental impact of farming hemp. Hemp uses less water, pesticides, and land than cotton. It also has a quick growing season and its deep roots remediate the soil from toxins.
The problems arise after the farm. Hemp, like linen, is a bast fiber, meaning the fiber is embedded in the stem of the plant. Hemp stems have many layers- a woody core, bast fibers, and a hard outer layer. To remove the fiber from the rest of the stem, hemp traditionally goes through a labor-intensive process.
Once the farmers finish the harvest, they bundle the stalks into piles on the field to start a weeks-long fermentation process called dew retting, which naturally releases the fiber from the rest of the plant (figure 1). Then the fermented stalks are broken down with large rollers, beaten to remove the woody parts, and combed. Finally, the fiber is ready to be spun into yarn. Hemp fibers are long and coarse, unlike cotton’s soft and shorter ones, so special equipment is needed to spin the long fibers.
It's a long, tedious, expensive process and few mills have the correct equipment for it. The resulting fabric is rough and strong. Both the manual process and the resulting fabric are not compatible with the mass market where brands and consumers expect cheap, soft, and comfortable clothing.
HOMOGENOUS CLOTHING
Clothing is cheaper than ever– consumers are spending the same percentage of their wages on clothing but are buying way higher volumes of it. Brands are making more clothing than ever– the annual global production is 80 to 150 billion garments to dress 7.95 billion people. Many factors allow global manufacturers to churn out so much excess of cheap clothing. Potentially the most important of which is polyester and GMO bt cotton’s monopoly on clothing raw materials.
72% of all clothing we wear is plastic and 22% is bt cotton. Although there is a huge diversity of clothing designs on the market, when you boil it down to the fiber level, we are wearing just two materials 94% of the time. In that sense, dystopian sci-fi films where the future is a homogenous society walking around wearing the same outfits are not far off. We are all wearing the same thing.
Polyester and bt cotton are predictable. Both are manmade to be uniform. Polyester is manufactured so all variables can be controlled and manipulated. Bt cotton has been modified to have uniform fibers, even the plants grow more evenly than any other cotton variety for efficient harvests. Their predictability and enormous raw material volumes make them easy to manufacture cheaply at huge scales.
The predictability then trickles down to the consumer who expects their clothing to act and feel a certain way. Both cotton and polyester are soft fabrics that are easy to maintain. They don’t (in most cases) pill. They have some elasticity, so they maintain their shape. They feel cool and crisp to the touch. They take synthetic dyes well. They aren’t itchy. They can be thrown together in the same wash and dry cycle without much thought. They may not be as sturdy as linen, supple as silk, or warm as wool but they are what we are used to.
It is a lot scarier to buy a silk blouse that requires hand-washing or dry cleaning and is probably significantly more expensive than a polyester, washable alternative. It makes sense, the global production of silk is 202,000 metric tons and polyester is 63 million metric tons. Silk is not as ubiquitous as polyester, making its production much pricier but also making the resulting fabric unfamiliar for most consumers. The more our clothing supply becomes homogenous, the cheaper popular fibers become, the more we get used to the popular fibers, and the demand for those fibers increases, out-competing the alternatives.
So then how can hemp, a naturally coarse fiber, become popular in a soft farbric-loving market? How will China process 1.3 million hectares of hemp if it's incompatible with the existing polyester and bt cotton infrastructure? The answer is simple: cottonize it. Researchers have found ways to convert raw hemp into a cotton-like substance that skips all the laborious steps above. They found a mix of chemical, mechanical, and heat-intensive processes that will remove the woody parts of the hemp stem and shorten and soften the fiber to mimic cotton. Examples include osmotic degumming, enzymatic retting, steam explosion, and mechanical decortication, all of which are much less natural than fermenting the fiber in the field. The resulting fiber can be spun in cotton spinning mills, blended with cotton and polyester, and feels like cotton.
Superwashed wool is similar. Wool shrinks and felts when exposed to heat, pills over time, and is itchy. To avoid those unknowns for customers, manufacturers superwash wool, a mechanical process, and synthetic coating that takes away the short hairs on the wool fiber. It makes wool act more like polyester. Linen can also be softened and shortened and the lower grades of silk (the shortest silk fibers) act more like cotton than other silks.
Although the amount of processing increases the footprint of the fiber, cottonizing unpopular fibers is not necessarily bad. It can act as a bridge– we can diversify what we are wearing and still feel comfortable wearing and caring for it. There is movement in sustainable food right now that argues we need to diversify what we eat. Not only is it better for our nutrition, but it's also better for the planet. Biodiversity helps species adapt, increases resilience, provides respective ecosystem services, and emulates natural systems. Biodiversity is decreasing not just in our wild spaces, but also in our farm fields. That’s true for foods and fiber. Just as a diverse diet of locally grown foods is a more sustainable choice, so is buying clothing with a diversity of raw, natural materials.
NOTES
https://www.just-style.com/features/analysis-will-hemp-replace-cotton-as-must-have-fibre/?cf-view
https://recreator.org/blogs/hemp-101/hemp-101-a-traditional-method-of-hemp-textile-production
https://textileexchange.org/app/uploads/2022/10/Textile-Exchange_PFMR_2022.pdf
https://www.planetaid.org/blog/shifting-the-cost-why-our-clothes-are-so-cheap
https://mairinwilson.substack.com/p/septemeber-hemp
https://mairinwilson.substack.com/publish/posts/detail/139155633?referrer=%2Fpublish%2Fposts
Articles like this are so important. Thank you for sharing. ❤️
I appreciate the idea that just like diversifying our foods, we should diversify the variety of crops grown for garments. I haven't thought of it this way, but of course it makes sense to grow a variety of sustainable and renewable resources for garments that will benefit the landscape and its inhabitants, not to mention we'll have beautiful clothing that is meant to last decades and are a good match for our regional climates.