We need to avoid taking sustainability at face value, and have more awareness of the materials that we choose, from the farmer right through to the end product. It is vital that we incorporate everyone across the value chain, and ensure that all voices are heard and respected. We also need to think about a cradle-to-cradle approach to textiles, starting with the soil, and working from the ground up.
Harriet Fletcher-Gilhuys combines the knowledge of a maker with the perspective of a systems researcher, reconnecting the people involved in British wool from farmer to finished garment.
Harriet Fletcher-Gilhuys understands textiles with her hands as well as on a spreadsheet.
She can source fleece, spin wool, work with natural dyes and follow a material through the multiple stages between farm and finished garment.
That practical knowledge led her away from thinking about textiles purely at the point of design.
At Fashion Roundtable, her attention turned towards the fragmented British wool supply chain – the growers, graders, spinners, mills, designers and makers whose work has to connect if a domestic material is actually going to be used domestically.
The Great British Wool Revival, developed with The King’s Foundation, maps those relationships and makes them easier for the industry to navigate.
Fletcher-Gilhuys’s route is a useful reversal of the usual fashion conversation.
Instead of beginning with the finished product and asking how sustainable it looks, she starts at the other end: where did the material come from, whose work made it possible and what happens to it next?
In the case of wool, that means starting with the soil.
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