If plants have shaped fashion’s past, couldn’t they hold the secret to its future? Global leader in sustainable fashion and natural storyteller, Carry Somers takes us on a journey through time and place to meet the plants that have shaped our clothes and reveals the human stories of the visionaries and idealists, activists and obsessives, pioneers and their passion, profiteers and greed – to help us understand how we might find better ways of working by reconnecting with nature.

For thousands of years, our clothes were created in harmony with nature. In Latin, textus means something woven and, from the beginning, textiles have been a means of communication – the Ömie women of Papua New Guinea swaddle babies in traditional cloth to imbue them with their identity and culture. We learned how to twist plant fibre into three-ply to strengthen it. Then colour became a symbol of power as the right to wear clothes dyed purple and blue was claimed by noblemen. The English passion for blue dye from woad came into conflict with the French love of red madder in medieval times. Grown separately, both plants are extractive but, if grown together, they would have restored and sustained the soil. Now we can look to culture and community to build a new, sustainable model, engaging with Indigenous peoples and traditions, those who are transforming plant fibres and dyes into a catalyst for resistance and an ally for justice, as well as the innovators exploring plant-led design for the future.

The Nature of Fashion is an epic sweep through history, revealing how plants have been used to make and dye our clothes. Textiles have transformed the human world – and the natural world. Now we need to re-root clothes-making in plants, rather than plastic, to find a new material future. Fashion is at a turning point – to look forward, we need to look back.