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

"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.