Linen accounts for less than 1% of the global textile market, but it has a bit of a cult following.
“It’s crisp and when you press it and it has this sheen to it that, to me, it’s almost like a beautiful parchment paper,” designer Matthew Addonizio enthused in his brand-new fabric shop, Approved Textiles, on Fabric Row. “And then as you wear linen, it gets softer and softer. And that’s why I love it. It is a majority of my clothing.”
Billy Green, a barber in Germantown, came to a PA Flax Project processing event dressed in head-to-toe linen. The fabric would be perfect for capes for their clients, they mused, because it is antimicrobial and hair doesn’t stick to it.
Director of Education Janell Wysock, a fiber artist who teaches at Moore College of Art and Design, also relishes the fabric. “I do quilting with linen,” she told me. “And then I use linen on the backs of all of my pillows just because it’s a beautiful fiber… Not dyed. I just love the naturalness of it. And then I put it with my bright textiles.”
Connecting this enthusiasm for linen fabric with knowledge about flax as an agricultural product is an integral part of the PA Flax Project’s mission. In the hundred-plus years since flax was produced in the region, much has changed about how consumers view textiles.
“I was doing research on the depression era, the look of the depression era,” said Founder and CEO Heidi Barr, who used to be a costume designer. “And they were saying the reason that people were so darn raggedy then is because, going into it, the average person had nine outfits, right? Today, the average person has nine pair of jeans and then nine pair of chinos and then 10 of this… The average person has more like 40 outfits.”
These consumption habits are only increasing. In the first 15 years of the 21st century, consumers more than doubled the number of clothing items they purchased and, over the same period, began to keep each item half as long, according to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe.
“What fast fashion has also done in addition to providing people with $5 t-shirts is that it makes them want a new t-shirt every week,” Addonizio, who has no direct affiliation with the PA Flax Project, told me. “And so people don’t have an emotional attachment to their clothing anymore. Most people, they don’t understand where it comes from, and maybe they would care if they did understand.”
A lot of these garments are polyester, which accounts for more than 57% of global fiber production. So it’s not just where it comes from (an oil well) but where it goes that is cause for concern. Discarded textiles are often shipped to landfills in the Global South, to places like the Atacama Desert in Chile, where the landscape is polluted by mounds of fabric.
Notably, the distressing realities of the garment industry are not the focus of the PA Flax Project’s messaging, which is primarily an attempt to plant the seed of an alternative in people’s minds. In many ways, the ethos of the slow-fashion movement is the same as that of the slow-food movement. Aside from reducing pollution, sustainable production practices often result in a higher-quality (albeit usually more expensive) product that has deeper significance to both producer and consumer.
“I’ve been growing vegetables for a really long time,” Director of Agriculture Bill Schick told me, “and I’m used to foodies. But to see people who are really into fiber arts and textiles get really excited about a plant when they might not otherwise be excited about plants is really fun, too.”
It’s important to note that a lot of sustainably produced products are expensive compared to mass-market alternatives. However, Boston University School of Public Health researchers found that higher-income communities generate 76% more clothing waste than lower-income communities. A shift in mindset among people for whom the cost of linen is not prohibitive could have a big impact on consumption patterns. Also, being aware of the differences between fibers and production processes doesn’t necessarily mean buying linen instead of polyester.
“We’re really trying to spark an interest and get more people down to these fabric stores,” Addonizio said of his reasons for opening Approved Textiles. “Even replacing a button on your shirt, it’s like your participation in slow fashion… And maybe we can get people to make their own clothes or get a pattern and some thread and do a repair.”
It’ll be a while before Addonizio can carry local linen at Approved Textiles, which stocks more cotton than linen. (The linen they do stock is from a company that supports weavers who use traditional handlooms in their homes in West Bengal.) Even if the linen fibers were ready tomorrow, domestic textile manufacturing infrastructure is essentially nonexistent.
“So up until NAFTA,” Barr explains, “we were still producing textiles. We weren’t growing flax, but we were still producing cut and sew textiles in the US at scale… it’s like really recent that we’ve outsourced it all.”
Once the PA Flax Project’s mill is online, the spinnable fiber will likely be shipped to Europe to be made into textiles. When I asked Barr how soon we might be able to buy PA-grown linen clothes, she was adamant that they are moving pretty fast.
“We’re talking about three to five years for spinnable fiber that can then be turned into yarns and fabric,” Barr explained. “In the overall journey of reestablishing an industry, that’s a very short timeline… And artisanally, you can produce things within a year. But I think in terms of revitalizing an industry, we are really closing in on this.”
This is the third in a series of articles that comprised my applied research project, Local Linen, for the Digital Journalism and Design master’s program at the University of South Florida.