Can Farm-to-Closet Work for Fashion?
By Christina Binkley
Vogue Business
New York menswear designer Todd Snyder’s Spring 2021 collection includes denim made in a manner that might be called farm-to-closet. His $300 selvedge jeans will use fabric woven at a Louisiana mill using so-called e3 sustainable cotton that can be traced back to the American farm fields where it was grown.
Snyder is one of a number of designers and brands that believe consumers will respond positively to discovering the origins of their apparel by tracking them through the supply chain.
To date, fashion labels haven’t capitalised much on the farm-to-table movement that has transformed the food business. But fashion and food often cater to the same socially conscious consumers, and brands including Rag & Bone, Wrangler and Imogene & Willie are now preparing farm-to-closet collections built around trackable American cotton.
The question is whether this clever marketing to the environmentally conscious consumer could be scaled to the volumes to compete with cotton milled and sewn into apparel in China, which is responsible for nearly a quarter of cotton apparel and fabric sold in the US.
Tracking cotton is not entirely new — for example, Applied DNA Sciences is able to track cotton from the gin, though not back to individual farms, through its CertainT platform. That may lack the same heart-tugging consumer appeal, but it enables brands to certify the quality of cotton they are using, such as more luxurious pima varieties that are important to luxury bedding manufacturers. The new marketing initiative — using branded e3 Sustainable cotton that was introduced in 2013 — features cotton that has been meticulously traced back to farms that grew it, tracking its environmental impact through cotton gins and textile mills. It’s billed as sustainable due to its relatively low water and chemical needs and because it is entirely grown and manufactured in the US, sometimes travelling only a few dozen miles in its journey from plant fibre to cloth. As a result, it offers up Instagram-friendly images of its farmers tilling soil and American looms weaving fabric.
It’s part of an unusual approach to selling seed developed by the German industrial giant BASF Corp., and it represents an unusual marriage of 21st century cloud technology and 18th century industrial cooperation.
Beyond the likely consumer appeal, the cotton-tracing technology offers a rare opportunity to fashion brands: the ability to measure, rather than loosely estimate, the relative carbon footprint of a textile. That has broad implications for fashion labels investing in carbon tracking and offsets.