The Nature of Fashion: A Botanical Story of Our Material Lives

by Carry Somers

ISBN: 9781915294791

Published: 2025-11-11

If plants have shaped fashion’s past, couldn’t they hold the secret to its future? Vivid, celebratory, impassioned and angry, 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 the human world and our natural landscape. More than just a story about plant-based fashion, The Nature of Fashion chronicles the plant stewards, obsessives, innovators and profiteers who have shaped what we wear. It is about the clash of worlds, voracious exploitation and silenced voices; about devotion, passion, blindness, idealism, greed and how clothing has separated us from nature. Told through intimate vignettes into this past, each person, people group, plant and place is a thread in the fabric of the book, forging connections across place and time. And like weaving, as the story strands weave in and out, the pattern slowly emerges. As the centuries unfold, we meet plants from every continent and...