Ancestral Threads: Revealing the True Nature of Fashion with Carry Somers
How plant-based fibers and dyes, borne from ancient traditions and resilient communities, are shaping a new, natural future for fashion.
Carry Somers is a visionary fashion designer, author, and changemaker whose work has reshaped the global fashion landscape. As co-founder of Fashion Revolution—the world’s largest fashion activism movement—and founder of the award-winning Fair Trade brand Pachacuti, she has spent decades pushing the industry toward transparency, equity, and environmental accountability. With an MA in Native American Studies, she has long championed Indigenous communities and traditions, embedding cultural and ecological respect into her design and advocacy. From pioneering radical supply chain transparency to co-founding the League of Artisans, her influence spans continents and sectors, earning her a place on the BoF500 and recognition through both a Churchill Fellowship and an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Keele University.
At the core of Carry’s work is a belief in the deep, material relationship between humans and the natural world. Her forthcoming book, The Nature of Fashion, traces the intertwined histories of plants and textiles across centuries and cultures, revealing how the fibers and dyes we once revered could guide us into a more connected, regenerative future. Whether sailing 2,000 miles to study plastic pollution in the Pacific or collaborating on an award-winning textile garden at RHS Chelsea, Carry continues to blend storytelling, scholarship, and lived experience to inspire a more grounded, imaginative, and ecological approach to what we wear.
An excerpt from Carry Somers’ book, The Nature of Fashion:
Imagine a centuries-old textile, like an antique tapestry. Now turn it over in your mind and explore the reverse, running your fingers across the threads, seeing how it was made, and remade.
On the surface, it may look pristine, like the snow in my garden, but beneath lies a tangle of loose threads, knots, centuries of care and repair. Each strand tells a story; remove one and the whole fabric might unravel. In the same way, our relationship with plants is not a linear narrative of progress but a tapestry of contrasts, where light and shadows intertwine. It is a story of mistakes and learning, frailty and resilience, strands cut, left hanging or repaired. Sometimes a strand even doubles back on itself and heads off the wrong way.
This journey began with a question: what if the story of humanity could be told through a single thread? That thread has carried us across centuries, from the earliest evidence of Neanderthal fibre technology to biomaterials and regenerative textiles. We have travelled continents and oceans, from the Amazon basin to the Great Smoky Mountains, from a sandstone escarpment in Mali to the royal palaces and odoriferous back streets of France, from the windswept bays of New Zealand to snowbound villages in Japan.
Everywhere we have seen how fibres and dyes are more than commodities. When land is stripped bare and sapped dry, when profit eclipses people, they leave indelible scars. But we’ve also seen how such materials can restore what has been lost, regenerating ecosystems, enriching soils and strengthening communities. Like snowflakes scattering light into the full spectrum of colour, these stories resist simplification, urging us to look more deeply and question what we think we know.
For too long, we have framed nature as separate from humanity, a resource to be controlled or consumed, perpetuating a cycle of extraction and exploitation. But other ways of seeing are possible. The Guaraní understand existence as a process of becoming rather than being, a continuously unfolding relationship with the natural world. The fibres of their culture have been severed, but still the people hold strong, refusing to break. Their fight today is about more than reclaiming ancestral lands; it’s about restoring integrity to a woven way of life. It is about retracing their steps to the Land Without Evil, where the past and future intertwine, trusting the shiny red dye seeds to show them the way. Their philosophy challenges Western obsessions with permanence and stability, our seeking of unchanging truths and resistance to the inevitability of change. It demands a shift in perspective, like the inside-out reading of Guamán Poma’s mappa mundi in his chronicle of the world turned upside down. Can a single thread tell our story? In the end, perhaps it all comes down to the way we see.
The following interview has been transcribed from audio, with some revised sections.
INL: You launched Fashion Revolution in the wake of Rana Plaza—at a moment when the seams of the global fashion system were violently exposed. What called you to respond? What, in your view, was being demanded of all of us at that moment?
Carry: When I saw the Rana Plaza factory collapse1 in Bangladesh, I was struck by the activists searching through the rubble, looking for brand labels—trying to prove which brands were producing there. Because the brands really didn’t know what their relationship was with that factory complex. The lack of transparency and accountability in supply chains really stuck me in large part because of the work I’d been doing with my brand, Pachacuti2, at the time.
Pachacuti was the world’s first fair-trade certified company. By that stage, we’d been going for more than 20 years. So we had the first fair trade certification. But also, I think, more relevant, we'd undertaken a three-year European traceability project. So we'd mapped our entire supply chains—right back to the processing facilities, the weaver's houses, and the GPS coordinates of the parcels of land where the Carludovica palmata3 grew on community-owned biodiverse plantations.
So we knew everything. We'd gathered around 70 different social, economic, and environmental indicators year on year to measure our impact. And I knew that nobody was really interested. We were showing at London Fashion Week, Paris Fashion Week. I'd tried to talk to the press, tried to talk to other brands when we were wholesaling. Nobody really understood the importance of transparency.
So, when I saw the Rana Plaza collapse, I thought, people are going to realize why I've been banging on about transparency for all of these years. Very soon, I realized that it wasn’t about me or my brand, or shining a light on the work we’d been doing around transparency. It was about doing something for all of these people—and for all the other invisible workers in the supply chain.
I had this idea a few days later for doing something—putting on an event on the anniversary. Very quickly, it snowballed, and people wanted to be a part of it from all over the world. We ran the first year on a tiny, tiny budget… what I could scramble together. But we had something like 69 different countries involved in the first Fashion Revolution Day event. All around the world, it really showed that people were demanding a fairer, cleaner, and more transparent fashion industry. And brands really started to listen.
INL: Over a decade after founding Fashion Revolution, what significant changes have you observed in the fashion industry, and where do you believe further transformation is still needed?
Carry: We definitely have seen a significant increase in transparency across fashion brands, in particular since the Rana Plaza factory collapse. One of the measures we can use for this is the Fashion Transparency Index4, which was one of Fashion Revolution's initiatives. I believe there were something like seven editions. So, measuring and monitoring fashion brands with disclosure around policies, practices, and impacts. We really saw brands starting to disclose more information.
In the first year, brands were like, “Why would we share this? This is proprietary information. Why would we publish our factory lists?” And in that first year, only 12.5 % of brands published their first-tier factory lists. A couple published their processing facilities, and no brands published their raw-material suppliers.
Now, it's well over 50 % of brands publish their first-tier suppliers, and a significant number publish processing facilities and raw materials as well. This makes it much easier to piece it all together. If something does happen at a facility, it’s very easy to see which brands are producing there. That’s been a really significant improvement.
I’m working on the launch of a new report, which comes out on the 19th of June called the Crafted Report5. As part of this, we have created an “Artisans Index,” inspired by the Fashion Transparency Index. We’re looking at both fashion brands and homeware brands. It’s very clear that fashion brands have had the spotlight shone on them in ways homeware brands have escaped that level of scrutiny. So, yes—the report is launching on the 19th of June, and it will be publicly available online, including all the brand scores.
We’re very much focusing on good practice and recommendations, because artisans—and particularly the environmental impacts of artisans—have been very much omitted from brand disclosures. There’s often a feeling like, “Artisans? Isn’t that just low impact by nature?” Well—not necessarily, if we talk about dyeing, block printing, wax, or artisanal tanneries.
I’ve been to the tannery district in Bangladesh. I’ve seen where the leather comes from for some mid‑price luxury fashion brands. I’ve seen the effluent flowing out into the drainage ditches and going straight into the river, which is home of a red‑listed species of river dolphin (Ganges river dolphin)6.
So it’s clear that we do need brands to be accountable for artisanal processes—as well—within their supply chains. The idea is to show good practice and highlight the gaps. We’re also mapping disclosure against environmental data, like air quality in Delhi, for instance. It’s about more than the index—it’s really a guidebook to show the way forward: so fashion brands know how to disclose artisanal impact and take responsibility for artisanal processes in their supply chains.
INL: In The Nature of Fashion, you trace the roots of clothing through plant-based fibers, dyes, landscapes, and our relationship to them. What have you discovered in that process—and what’s one thing you hope all of us who wear clothes come to understand?
Carry: It’s really hard to think of one thing I’ve learned, because I learned so many things in the process of writing this book. One thing that stands out is that it really led me to reconsider some of my earlier assumptions. I had previously sort of placed that separation of humans and nature on the shoulders of the Enlightenment philosophers7, like Isaac Newton and Descartes.
They were instrumental, really, in shaping the way that we think today, sanctioning our right to exploit nature in the name of material progress. And this is when we sort of saw nature becoming, you know, the idea of nature becoming a machine—effectively: it was there for us to exploit in that worldview.
But, as part of the research, I discovered that this rift between humans and the natural world really began thousands of years earlier. One of my stories is set in 6400 BCE in Çatalhöyük8, in modern-day Turkey. I saw how people had started to have an appetite for consumer goods.
They’d also brought in cows. And to provide more land for the cows, they started chopping down the trees. The trees they were also using to make their clothes. These were oak trees. They were using the soft inner bark of the oak tree to make their textiles. Those cows really opened a sluicegate of unintended consequences. The site’s leading archaeologist described Çatalhöyük as an early example of how the advent of farming ended our symbiotic relationship with nature.
But did it end it as well?
What we don’t know is what happened afterward. Yes, the city collapsed—it was like the earliest example of a modern proto‑city9. But did those people then learn from that cascade of cause and effect that had devastated their ecosystem and start anew somewhere else? And did they carry their hard‑won wisdom with them? We will never know whether those community elders started embedding cautionary tales into their cultural fabric.
It’s interesting to look at that and regard it almost as a hopeful story. Because yes, there are really early examples of how we have destroyed our environment. But there are also examples of how we have learned from it—not just in Turkey, but in Central America as well. We look at some of the destruction that the fashion industry is carrying out today. But I do believe it can change. And that, for me, is the hope. I believe that there is a better way forward. And, hopefully, this book will sow some of the seeds of that.
INL: Can you share how your own heritage and connection to place—particularly your roots in England—have shaped your perspective on craftsmanship, and the importance of honoring tradition in a modern world?
Carry: Yes, I wrote the book in Branscombe, almost all of the book. Branscombe is a really small village—in terms of inhabitants—in East Devon. It’s a very deep-sided valley where my ancestors have lived for hundreds and hundreds of years. It’s a lace-making valley, it’s a smuggling valley—or it was a smuggling valley. It’s caught in this sort of irregular landscape of pinnacles and gullies. You’ve got the Jurassic limestone on one side, and then you’ve got the red cliffs—the Triassic red cliffs—on the other side. And it feels like it’s very much in a fault line as well.
I have a caravan there—I feel incredibly fortunate—I have a caravan in the under‑cliffs. This is where the cliffs slid away in around 1780 and came to rest halfway between the top of the cliff and the sea. It’s this incredibly magical landscape. It’s a real haven for rare species of plants and animals, as well as peregrine falcons nesting up above me. I’m also surrounded by incredible flora.
I have madder, which produces a red dye, growing everywhere in my garden. I have weld, which produces a yellow dye, growing on the cliff—both ancient dye plants which crop up time and again in my book. It made me realize very much how rooted my family, my ancestors were in that place.
It felt like a place where they were very much in tune with the rhythms of the natural world. They farmed the earliest potatoes there. They brought seaweed up by donkey. There’s still donkey paths there. My father still has photographs of the last of the cliff farmers, Cliffy Gosling, laden, putting seaweed into the panniers of his donkeys. They would carry them up the donkey paths and use them to fertilize England’s earliest new potatoes.
These were practices that the village—the community—had drawn on for a really long time. It made me realize how connected my ancestors were with the earth there. Maybe back then we really weren’t that different from some of the indigenous communities who still do practice agriculture in those kinds of ways which respect the earth.
I think about my ancestors and just not knowing that there was another continent around the side of Berry Head where the lighthouse flashes now. If they’d carried on going out to sea, they would never have known that there was another continent out there. And people who, in those times—hundreds of years ago—were practicing agriculture in very much the same ways. But now, so much has changed.
I’m lucky that the farmers within the village do practice that agriculture in a very respectful way. It’s wonderful to see that. But I know that that’s far from the norm in the world today.
INL: Humans have dyed cloth for thousands of years—often in ways that honored place, season, and ritual. What have we lost in forgetting how to color with the land? And which communities are still honoring this today?
Carry: That’s a really interesting question. It’s really interesting to think about color and honoring place, because when we buy clothing—where does that color come from? We’ve really lost that connection with the land.
Also, that idea of what color is… I mean, I’ve got in my second chapter: “Color Flowed Through Every Land.” I really delve into that idea—of what color really is. We have the scientific explanation, which I find quite hard to engage with. But we also have a much more beautiful, poetic one: color as the language of light, the hidden dialogue between the sun and the earth.
We have the scientific explanation, which I find quite hard to engage with. But we also have a much more beautiful, poetic one: color as the language of light, the hidden dialogue between the sun and the earth.
Colors aren’t static; they’re a living experience. For me, in my practice, color became a living experience. I had weld growing on the cliffs, and I didn’t even know it was weld at first. It was in a field where the dog would often hurtle after rabbits at the end of the day—no chance of catching one at all.
I kept looking and thinking, “What are those spikes at the top of the field? What’s that plant?” I thought, “Oh, it’s just going to be nettles or something.” But one day, I decided to take a closer look—and it was weld. There was lots of it, plenty to harvest, so I gathered armfuls.
I had a beautiful natural-dye dress which had been dyed by my friend, Kate Turnbull. We had a textile garden for Fashion Revolution at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in 2022. But at the gala event, I accidentally dropped a few drops of lemon juice from an oyster I was eating onto my dress—and of course it had taken out the color.
So I thought, this was a great opportunity to re-dye the dress. I didn’t have the right utensils there to boil it, so I threw on some hot water, put the weld in, strained it, and put my dress in. Then some neighbors came around, we opened a bottle of wine, and we started talking. About midnight, I realized my dress was still in dye, and I thought, "It’s going to be ruined"—but I pulled it out and hung it on my caravan deck to dry.
In the morning, I went to look at it—and it was golden. Honestly, it was the color of gold: rich, saturated, perfectly even. I couldn’t believe the color. I couldn’t believe it was made from those straggly strands of weld.
Weld is known as the “wasteland weed”—it grows on building sites and forgotten parts of land, and it produces the most incredible color. That taught me a new relationship with the land, with color, and a new experience. I thought, “I can do this with my clothes, with old bedsheets—anything I have.”
This is very much a part of everyday life for many communities today—who do experiments, who carry age-old knowledge of which plants to use.
I was fortunate to receive a Churchill Fellowship and visited Peru, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico, and I met many community groups—including the Yanesha in the Peruvian rainforest as well. People who are using these plants from their surroundings in the ways in which their ancestors have done. It was really heartening to see how many communities are still using these processes today to produce their clothes.
INL: In your book, you delve into the intricate process of weaving Echigo-jofu, a traditional Japanese textile born from 8 moons of snow. You describe how the women of Echigo turn the unremitting whiteness of their world into something dazzlingly alive. What can their work teach us about our relationship with place, material, and time?
Carry: I loved doing the research into the Echigo‑Jofu cloth. I really did. It was fascinating—not just to see it as an example of the slowest form of fashion, but also as a way of working with what nature had given these people.
White dominates their landscape for eight months a year. If you look at the pictures of the region, it really is like an eiderdown—it blankets everything beneath it. They’ve turned this unremitting whiteness into this incredibly beautiful cloth that is vibrantly alive. It made me reconsider white, because we always think of it as the absence of color. In reality, it’s not the absence of color at all—it actually reflects all the colors. It’s a brilliant color. And I philosophize a bit on what white really is. But it made me realize that this cloth was born of the snow. I talk about the cloth being a child of the snow, and it’s the snow that makes the cloth possible because in Tokyo, the strands of the nettle fibers, the ramie they’re using, would be too brittle—they would break. It’s only because they have this life below snow that they can create the finest cloth.
They weave this amazing cloth, and they also wash it in the meltwater rivers as the snow starts to melt, massaging it beneath their feet. When the weather warms, they spread it out across white-draped fields. There are so many different processes to this Echigo cloth. It’s an amazing fabric, which they’ve been making that way for hundreds of years.
For me, reading the story taught me that we can make textiles from anything in the world around us. We might think we aren’t in a place where fibers grow. I mean, I watched the film The Nettle Dress recently and met the director and star. Alan lost his wife and decided to make a dress from nettles—nettles grow everywhere, in most countries around the world—and he made a fibre from them.
It really shows us that whatever is growing around us, there is potential—potential to make clothing, to dye clothing. It also teaches us about the slowness of craft. We are so used to dipping something—if we dye ourselves, we just dip it into a packet of Dylon (chemical dye). This is about slow processes, slow craft, slow weaving, slow dyeing, and bleaching in the sun.
This doesn’t only happen in Japan. There are stories in Ireland about bleaching linen with moonbeams. People even whitewashed their doors to harness the light of the moon—because the English had taxed everything to the high heavens, but at least the moon was still free. So, this isn’t unique to Echigo, but it is the place where the slowness of craft was most apparent to me.
INL: Color is a gift from the Earth. Yet when we moved to synthetic dyes, rivers turned fluorescent and workers have paid the price. What do you think we need to understand about the true cost of color today?
Carry: I’ve been carrying out quite a lot of research into how fibers break down. Back in 2020, I was part of eXXpedition, an all‑women sailing voyage. It was supposed to be a round‑the‑world voyage, but of course got scuttled by COVID. Still, I sailed from the Galapagos to Easter Island. We were dropping manta trawls and Niskin bottles and sifting the ocean for plastics—looking specifically for microfibers and microplastics.
A few years later, I carried out a project called Restoring Riverscapes with Fashion Revolution, collaborating with scientists from Keele and Loughborough University. This was based at Rudyard Lake—I can almost see it from the window here. It’s a lake in Staffordshire, a two‑minute walk from my front door, downstream of several mills active during the Industrial Revolution—both textile mills and paper mills.
[At that time] paper mills were using textiles—using the rags to turn into paper. We gathered sediment samples from the bottom of the lake using a sediment sampler and invited members of the community to help analyze them under microscopes. It’s important to understand that sediment acts like a time machine: lower layers are older, and upper layers more recent. Lakes often have low deposition rates—it means not much sediment is falling. So you can actually go back quite a long way in some lakes.
We were really astonished [by the results]. We sent our samples to Northumbria University to be analyzed. We found the earliest fibers in the sediment sample dated back around 140 years. These weren’t synthetic of course, because synthetics weren't around then—these were mostly cotton. Cotton dominated the core even in recent years, making up 70–80% of all the fibers across all layers, and some wool in the older layers.
This led me to question: why aren’t these fibers breaking down? Why are we finding 140‑year‑old natural fibers at the bottom of our local lake? A lot of it comes down to the coatings—it's actually the dye process that may be the main reason natural fibers aren’t biodegrading in natural environments.
When we look at man‑made cellulosics or semi‑synthetics—found in fabrics like viscose or rayon. These go through a process that turns them from cellulose I to cellulose II—so they might come from trees, or come from plants like bamboo—but actually at the end of the day, there’s nothing in nature that knows how to break these fabrics and fibers down.
So these processes are important, the chemical coatings are important, like the waterproof treatments or PFAS of course. But particularly important are the dye processes, the duration of the dye process, and the types of dyes used. But there are alternatives. I attended a conference a couple of weeks ago where someone was dyeing with natural dyes during the spinning process and getting excellent results—in a fraction of the time conventional dyeing takes.
There’s some really exciting new technologies, but also looking back to ancient wisdoms at the same time—combining both of them—which is taking place. There’s certainly potential there, but we need to understand: it’s not that synthetic fibers are inherently bad, nor that natural fibers are automatically good—it all depends on how they’re dyed and treated as well. We need to take a truly holistic look at both the fibers our clothes are made from, and what we’re using to dye them with.
We need to take a truly holistic look at both the fibers our clothes are made from, and what we’re using to dye them with.
INL: As someone who has deeply studied the relationship between plants and textiles, what emerging practices or materials do you believe hold the most promise for transforming the fashion industry into one that is both sustainable and deeply connected to the natural world?
Carry: I think one of the most interesting parts of the research for me was looking at the alternative coatings for textiles.
One of the stories in the book is set in the Judean Desert and explores a coating made from sea squill10 and styrax11. These were used to coat baskets to make them waterproof and to coat the sacred skulls found in the cave called Nahal Hever12. I started to do research into alternative coatings—those applied to textiles to make them waterproof, UV-resistant, antimicrobial, anti-pilling—and discovered there are many incredible natural ways of creating these coatings. Many of them come from agricultural residues—tea-stem waste, for instance. Not only that, but these have properties just as good as, or better than, their synthetic counterparts.
We could use these natural agricultural residues to give our textiles the coatings that they need, rather than the forever chemicals that remain in our environment, animals, and human bodies, impacting our health and fertility. We really have to find alternatives to the PFAS situation. They do exist, and we can use them in our textiles today. For me, that was a really hopeful piece of research—and one of the most fascinating papers I’ve read.
You can learn more about Carry Somers here, and pre-order The Nature of Fashion here.
The Rana Plaza factory collapse occurred on April 24, 2013, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, when an eight-story garment factory building collapsed, killing over 1,100 workers and injuring thousands more. It remains the deadliest accident in the history of the garment industry and sparked a global movement for transparency and accountability in fashion supply chains.
Pachacuti is the award-winning Fair Trade hat brand founded by Carry Somers. Based in the UK and working with women artisans in the Andes, the brand pioneered radical supply chain transparency and sustainable luxury, blending traditional craftsmanship with enduring design and environmental responsibility.
Carludovica palmata, commonly known as the Panama hat plant, is a palm-like perennial native to tropical America. Despite its name, it's not a true palm but belongs to the Cyclanthaceae family. Its soft, durable fibers are traditionally used to weave Panama hats and other items. Cultivated primarily in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Panama, it's also known as toquilla or jipijapa.
The Fashion Transparency Index is an annual review published by Fashion Revolution, ranking 250 of the world’s largest fashion brands based on their public disclosure of environmental and social policies, practices, and impacts across their supply chains. It aims to drive accountability and systemic change in the global fashion industry.
The CRAFTED Report exposes blind spots in fashion and homeware climate claims, introducing the Artisans’ Index—the first benchmark of how 50 global brands disclose the environmental impact of artisan production. Led by Keele University in partnership with the League of Artisans and funded by the IMPACT+ Innovation Network.
Red-listed river dolphins in Bangladesh—such as the endangered Ganges river dolphin (Platanista gangetica)—are threatened by industrial pollution, dam construction, and harmful fishing practices. Among these, untreated wastewater from the fashion industry introduces toxic dyes, heavy metals, and microplastics into rivers, degrading ecosystems and impairing the dolphins’ sonar-dependent navigation.
Enlightenment philosophers such as René Descartes and scientists like Isaac Newton advanced mechanistic and dualistic views of the world—positioning nature as external, measurable, and separate from human consciousness. This shift is commonly regarded as a key moment in shaping the Western worldview of human dominance over nature.
Çatalhöyük is a 9,000-year-old Neolithic site in what is now Turkey, renowned as one of the world’s earliest large human settlements. Excavations beginning in the 1960s—and most recently led by Ian Hodder since 1993—have revealed complex community structures, early agriculture, murals, and intimate domestic settlements.
A proto-city is an early large settlement with some urban features but without full city governance. Çatalhöyük is a key example.
Sea squill (Drimia maritima) is a coastal Mediterranean plant historically used for medicinal, pesticidal, and waterproofing purposes. Its resinous extract was applied in ancient times as a protective coating, particularly for baskets and ritual objects, due to its adhesive and water-resistant qualities.
Styrax is a natural resin derived from trees of the Styrax genus, particularly Styrax officinalis. Valued since antiquity, it was used in incense, perfumes, and protective coatings. Its aromatic and adhesive properties made it suitable for ritual use and as a sealant for objects such as baskets, ceramics, and sacred artifacts.
Nahal Hever is a site in the Judean Desert known for caves that preserved human remains, textiles, and scrolls dating from the Roman and Bar Kokhba periods. Notable discoveries include skulls coated with resinous materials and fragments of ancient garments, offering rare insights into ritual, preservation, and textile practices in arid environments.