The Nature of Fashion: A Botanical Story of Our Material Lives - Hardcover

by Carry Somers (Author)

"One of our favorite reads of 2025." Dressed: History of Fashion Podcast

Named one of the best fashion books of 2025 by Fashionista

2025 Foreword Reviews INDIES Award HONORABLE Mention for History

What if the story of humanity could be told through a single thread?

Long before we inked out thoughts onto parchment, perhaps even before we etched stories onto stone, we began spinning plant fibres. Textiles are among our earliest attempts to fashion the world around us. They have shaped our history, mythology, politics and trade, and transformed our relationship with the natural world.

From the moment someone first turned plant into fibre, cloth became a language, with threads like words, spun and woven. In The Nature of Fashion, global sustainable-fashion leader and activist Carry Somers travels through time and across cultures to explore these stories: from the first bark fibres twisted into string to the snow-white nettle cloth in Echigo, Japan. We are swept up in the trade wars between medieval England's dyers, see the rise of fast fashion in Marie Antoinette's France, and land in the present with stories of regeneration and hope from El Salvador, Peru and beyond.

In these stories of artists and idealists, rebels and reformers, the wisdom of the past is reconnected to the seeds of a sustainable future, offering a bold reimagining of what fashion could become. Vivid, impassioned and celebratory, The Nature of Fashion is an epic sweep through the hidden history of how we created clothing from plants.

Author Biography

Carry is a globally recognised entrepreneur, activist, speaker and opinion leader, named by Business of Fashion as one of the key people shaping the global fashion industry. As co-founder of Fashion Revolution, the world's largest fashion activism movement with teams in over 90 countries, she has been instrumental in pressuring the industry to take responsibility for its social and environmental impacts.

Carry's award-winning fashion brand, Pachacuti, became a pioneer of radical supply chain transparency and the world's first Fair Trade Certified company. Since then, Carry has sailed from the Galapagos to Easter Island investigating microplastic pollution, collaborated on a show garden for RHS Chelsea Flower Show and appeared daily on the Nasdaq billboard in Times Square during New York Fashion Week 2022, which highlighted women-led social enterprises in the fashion industry driving social and environmental impact. Carry is lead consultant for The Good Clothes Show, which opened at the NEC Birmingham in September 2024.

A regular spokesperson in the media, Carry is a go-to commentator for the BBC and other media whenever there is a fashion news story. She has been interviewed on countless shows including NPR's Here and Now, BBC One's The One Show, Radio 4's Mary Portas On Style and the EU Delegation's official UK podcast, London Calling EU. In print, she has appeared in British Vogue, Vanity Fair, Financial Times How to Spend It, IRK Living At Home with an Icon cover article in February 2023, Vogue Portugal, Business of Fashion, Marie Claire France, Women's Wear Daily and many others.