“For thousands of years, cotton has grown in multiple colorways, in browns, beiges, pinks, lilacs, oranges, and greens, used historically by the Indigenous peoples of Peru. But then the Peruvian government decided to ban colored cotton because of fear of contamination of pure white pima cotton… So the crops had to be burned, uprooted.” – Carry Somers
What do we know about the oldest surviving textiles of the world? How might learning about the biocultural history of fibers transform how we relate to fashion? And what does it mean to remember the sacredness of the cloth — in conjunction with questions around access and affordability?
In our latest Green Dreamer episode, I speak with Carry Somers, the Co-founder of Fashion Revolution and the author of The Nature of Fashion.
Join us as we reconnect with the origins of textiles and what they teach us about the inseparability of culture and ecology.
Highlights from our conversation I’m still sitting with…
This introduction to the earliest known use of thread and string…
Green Dreamer Kaméa: In your book, you invite us into this sort of biocultural textiles time machine, where we’re not just learning about fibers but walking with their land base and their cultural lineages, which I found to be really beautiful.
What sorts of evidence do we have of the earliest uses of thread and string? And why do you point out this question of whether archaeology may have overlooked the importance of textiles?
Carry Somers: It’s constantly changing. So people will probably find earlier evidence. But at the time of writing the book, the earliest evidence goes back to Abri du Maras, which is a rock shelter on the banks of the Rome River in modern day France. This is a shelter that was used by the Neanderthals.
Archaeologists discovered a stone tool, and wrapped around the top was string. But not just any string. This was three ply string. So these were fibers that had been twisted one way and then three strands plied back in the opposite direction to make it strong.
And string, as I say in the book, it might seem like a simple artifact to us now, but it really challenged our long-held assumptions about Neanderthals’ capabilities…
The last evidence of them is in caves in in what is now Gibraltar. But I think this shows that they were attempting to adapt to the changing world around them, perhaps because they were in simple hides and furs they might have used those fibers to sew up their hides to stop the wind getting in. They could potentially have started to craft undergarments as well as outer garments, tents, other accessories. But they just couldn’t adapt fast enough.
It was very likely the adoption of fiber technologies, as much as anything else, that allowed early humans to really spread out and into almost every biome on the planet.
This part on the story of the earliest known woven textiles…
Carry Somers: The earliest evidence of textiles, of plain weave textiles, is from Çatalhöyük in modern-day Turkey, alongside Jarmo in modern-day Iraq as well.
Çatalhöyük is a really, really interesting story. It’s one of the world’s first proto-cities. It had thousands and thousands of residents. This is about 9,000 years ago. The houses were either side of a river. They were really tightly packed together. People moved through the city actually on the roofs of the buildings. So that shows you how tightly packed they were. This fostered a really bustling community.
And they had rich cultural practices. It seems that both art and textile technologies were really integral to the cultural life of the city. And it’s speculated that it was actually a really egalitarian society.
But something started to change as the years progressed.
Initially, their textiles came from oak trees. A lot of our early textiles weren’t flax and cotton. They came from tree-based fiber. So the ones that the Neanderthals crafted came from a conifer. The ones from Çatalhöyük came from the soft, inner bark of an oak tree.
But then they brought in the cows. And to give the cows grass, they started to cut down the trees. As they cut down the trees it just started this cascade of cause and effect. So the river dried up, the soil became eroded. Fights broke out and there weren’t any before. And we start to see how this egalitarian society really shifted quickly into one where people wanted more and more cows.
There’s evidence of people when they look at their skulls, they can see that people were sort of hitting each other over the head… Eventually the city collapsed. They cut down so many trees that they were forced to migrate and the whole of the city collapsed.
And this segment on the sacredness of the cloth…
Green Dreamer Kaméa: I often think of clothing kind of like art — as a mirror of our times. For us, a lot of it shows how uprooted and disconnected many people are from the sources of our everything, the extractive consumerist logic of modernity. So we quite literally wear the state of the world and our complicity and our entanglement on our sleeves.
And there’s an interesting question that comes up for me. I was recently watching a video about Native American regalia, where they were showing that these handmade garments cost thousands of dollars, not because they’re luxury in the sort of elitist, branded sort of way, but because they’re sacred and often handmade from start to finish and involve very culturally skilled craftsmanship.
Obviously there’s a difference between special occasion wear versus daily wear, but even slow fashion that isn’t intended for special occasion, in general, is more expensive — justifiably so because they better honor the hands and the lands that made the item possible.
But there’s this challenge that comes up then, which is where people might want to support things that were more ethically and consciously made, but then questions of accessibility and affordability come up.
So I’m wondering what you think in terms of how we hold this tension between affordability and kind of sacred reverence, which essentially invites a different way of relating to what we wear all together.
Carry Somers: Yes. Two weeks ago when I started my U.S. book tour, I was just at the Museum of the American Indian in New York. What an incredible collection of textiles, but also the fibers, the breadth of the fibers they use.
I’d just come from working in Guatemala, working with Indigenous entrepreneurs in Guatemala on a textile project for the International Trade Center. So many of the fibers that I saw in New York in that museum were reflected in the fibers I’d just been working with in Guatemala. So there was the corn husks and there was the most amazing corn husk textiles, so, so finely woven. And then there was also Tule, which is a reed that grows by the shores of Lake Atitlán. That same reed had been used in North America as well. Really incredibly fine fibers.
I think in terms of value, it’s about valuing that whole web of relationships. It’s about valuing where those fibers come from and looking at that whole cost of what we’re wearing.
Of course, I know there’s people who can’t afford to invest in an object that is beautifully crafted, that’s slow fashion, that’s sustainably made. But all of us can afford to slow down, to think more about where those fibers come from, to check our labels and make those responsible choices, you know, maybe to consume a little bit less as well.
I don’t think there’s probably anybody listening who can’t do that, who can’t make a choice between two fibers, whatever end of the fashion system you are in. And also to ask the questions from the brand […], those questions from Fashion Revolution — the who made my clothes and the what’s in my clothes, they are powerful questions. […]
Green Dreamer Kaméa: I’m also reminded by the fact that what is sacred can’t simply be bought because it’s often deeply relational and born out of intimate community relationships.
So I think I sense a sort of grief in thinking about all of this too because I’m like, how beautiful would it be if I can show a friend who’s visiting my wardrobe and be like this auntie wove this sweater for me for this particular event or occasion, this elder passed down this dress for me, and she wore it for this and this during her younger years. So, essentially, our entire closets could be archives of kind of our growing storied relations.
But this kind of material culture doesn’t just happen, especially in places where community relations have been so far eroded and severed.
So I think I’m just kind of sensing into this yearning. Like, I think about how materialism is often posed as something that is opposite to or opposed to spirituality and experience. But I’m like, what if this binary and separation is part of the problem too? And what if engaging the material world with much greater depth and care and love can also be a form of reverence?
Carry Somers: Yes, absolutely. I mean, so many of the stories in my book are about reverence. They are about how we treat the Earth, about how we treat fibers, about how we treat the plants that produce natural dyes.
The Nature of Fashion contains lots of story threads. So we follow different communities, we go back to different cultures, we go back to different countries, time and again through history to see how they were working in pre-colonial times, what happened with the impact of settlers, and that sort of clash of different world views.
In North America, I go back time and again to the Cherokee, looking at their understanding of the world, because for them, like so many Indigenous communities, every part of nature is alive and has a voice. The human voice is no louder than any other. […]
So when they start to take plants for fibers and dyes, like many Indigenous communities, they only take what they need and not what they want. And they don’t just take what’s easiest as well. They pass by the first plant and they collect only from the second or the third, making sure that the plant remains there for generations to come.
The plants, the colors are highly symbolic as well. Whether they use white, whether they use black, whether they use red, all of those colors are symbolic for the Cherokee.
After the early settlers arrive, we see the demarcation of their lands. We see people who just think in a different way, who see the plants as a resource to be extracted, not as sacred plants to be valued, not as symbolic.
The only symbolism for those early settlers is in the the material value of those plants, so how much are they worth in terms of fibers and dyes once they’re traded.
Cozy up and tap in ~
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About the guest ~
Carry Somers is an author and storyteller whose work connects the worlds of fashion, nature, and creativity. She co-founded Fashion Revolution, the world’s largest fashion activism movement, and founded Pachacuti, the world’s first Fair Trade certified company and a pioneer of supply chain transparency. Her work has influenced industries worldwide, from championing artisans to investigating microfiber pollution to exploring the future of plant fiber and dyes as a Churchill Fellow.
In The Nature of Fashion, Carry offers more than a history — she presents a vision. Drawing on decades of research, her lyrical exploration of the history of plant materials invites us to look beyond the surface and discover the deeper patterns that shape our lives. Her writing reveals how fashion is interwoven with the rhythms of nature, encouraging us to see the world in new and unexpected hues.
Artistic credits ~
(B/c we cherish art from real humans!!)
Follow and browse more from our episode artwork’s illustrator: isadora machado
Jive to this episode’s musical offering: “Novo Amanhecer” by Nessi Gomes
Sink in deeper ~
The Nature of Fashion, a book by Carry Somers
Check out the organization Fashion Revolution
Discover Pachacuti, the world’s first Fair Trade certified company
Learn more about some of the world’s earliest textiles
Find out more about Yolanda Contreras and the women reviving Peru’s native colored cotton
Read about the article “An Urgent Call from Guardians of the Heart of the World”
How to Save the Amazon, a book by Dom Phillips
Rhizome out further ~
Martín Prechtel: Relearning the languages of land, plants, and place (Ep443)
Nishanth Chopra: Rebuilding regenerative seed-to-sew fashion systems rooted in community (Ep307)
Lindsay Naylor: Who does “fair trade” really serve and benefit? (Ep419)
Imagine, embody, alchemize ~
To support Green Dreamer and to translate our intellectual explorations into more embodied practice, I welcome you to join alchemize, our 12-week, audio-based program of daily imagination and creative practices — an experimental invitation to sit with the mess, stretch comforts and alternatives, and disrupt status quo ways of thinking, sensing, being, and relating. Learn more here.
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