Paige Green

Model Sierra Reading wore this wool vest that was hand knit, felted, and dyed in onion skins and iron by local fiber artist Sue Reuser Cormo at the Fibershed fashion show and benefit that took place in April.

Last year, New York-based chef David Chang made headlines with a quip that Bay Area’s organic-local-sustainable cooking was terminally boring, consisting of little more than “figs on a plate.” Local foodies howled, pointing out the sophistication of ethical cooking.

But what about clothes? Can a locally-sourced wardrobe be more than bolts of fabric and a scarf — or whatever the sartorial equivalent of figs on a plate would be?

Rebecca Burgess decided to find out. Last spring, she began a unique project: to spend a year wearing only clothes made and dyed entirely by agricultural products produced sustainably within 150 miles of her West Marin home, or her “fibershed.”

A few years back Burgess, a self-described educator, textile artist and author, traveled to Thailand, Vietnam, and the Indonesian archipelago and witnessed first-hand the impact the garment industry had on the populations there. “People who worked in areas where they produced clothes for the West lived shorter lives and had many more illnesses,” she recalls. “The most polluted, impoverished communities were ones that were producing and dying garments for us.”

Of this experience, the Fibershed Project was born. And now, with the year almost over, Burgess is planning on creating a Fibershed Marketplace.

The goal, Burgess says, was to prove that “beauty and fashion can function hand-in-hand with sustainability, local economies, and regional agriculture.” The project borrows heavily from the tenets of the popular Slow Food movement.

“There are a lot of feelings of emptiness that the garment industry has exploited in us,” says Burgess. “There’s this idea that you need to fill your life up with all these cute garments so you look good and attract the right mate. But I think we have to reclaim what our clothing means. And I wanted to find clothes that reflect my care for the natural world." 

The garment industry pollutes as much as 200 tons of water per ton of fabric, and as many as 25% of chemicals produced worldwide are used for textiles. Because fibers such as cotton and wool are currently produced commercially in very few regions of the world, most modern clothing travels thousands of miles before it reaches a retail outlet, creating a significant carbon footprint.

Here's a look at Burgess' creations: 

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Burgess says she returned from Asia determined to “re-enliven an industry that’s based on the work of ones hands and organic farming practices.” She worked with photographer Paige Green to document the whole experience on the Fibershed blog, which officially launched last March. Burgess raised funds to finance her project through events and an initial Kickstarter grant, and many of the knitters and designers donated their time.

Burgess and the team she worked with took part in the full process of making the clothes, from planting indigo for dye, to getting to know local ranchers, to tanning animal hides by hand. Along the way, she met challenges that illuminated the state of fiber agriculture in the area.

For one, Burgess found that the infrastructure required for local wool and cotton production – not unlike other aspects of regional agriculture – was falling through the cracks. In the 1990s, when most textile production moved overseas, the mills closed, and the market for small-scale clothing production essentially evaporated.

“It’s not like pulling a carrot out of the ground and selling it for three times the cost of labor, seed, and water,” Burgess says. “After the wool is off the sheep, it has to go through equipment.”