Carry Somers, hosts London launch of 'THE NATURE OF FASHION', in partnership with Fashion Roundtable in September. For a sneak peak, keep reading for a behind the scenes Q&A
Headshot of Carry Somers. Image Credit: Carry Somers.
Book Launch Programme:
Introduction: Muna Reyal, Executive Editor at Chelsea Green Publishing and Julia Silk, Literary Agent at Greyhound Literary.
Reading: Excerpts from The Nature of Fashion by Carry Somers
Q&A: Hosted by Tamara Cincik, Founder & CEO of Fashion Roundtable
Book Signing by Carry
Drinks Reception: drinks, celebration and conversation with friends
The Nature of Fashion Book Cover. Image Credit: Carry Somers.
If plants have shaped fashion’s past, couldn’t they hold the secret to its future? Vivid, celebratory, impassioned and angry, The Nature of Fashion is an epic sweep through the history of how we learned to create clothing with plants, revealing how textiles have transformed the human world and our natural landscape.
More than just a story about plant-based fashion, The Nature of Fashion chronicles the plant stewards, obsessives, innovators and profiteers who have shaped what we wear. It is about the clash of worlds, voracious exploitation and silenced voices; about devotion, passion, blindness, idealism, greed and how clothing has separated us from nature.
Told through intimate vignettes into this past, each person, people group, plant and place is a thread in the fabric of the book, forging connections across place and time. And like weaving, as the story strands weave in and out, the pattern slowly emerges.
About Carry:
Instagram: @carrysomers
Carry Somers is an author and storyteller whose work connects the worlds of fashion, nature, and creativity. She co-founded Fashion Revolution, the world’s largest fashion activism movement, and founded Pachacuti, the world’s first Fair Trade certified company and a pioneer of supply chain transparency. Her work has influenced industries worldwide, from championing artisans to investigating microfibre pollution to exploring the future of plant fibres and dyes as a Churchill Fellow.
In The Nature of Fashion (Chelsea Green/Rizzoli Autumn 2025) Carry offers more than a history—she presents a vision. Drawing on decades of research, her lyrical exploration of the history of plant materials invites us to look beyond the surface and discover the deeper patterns that shape our lives. Her writing reveals how fashion is interwoven with the rhythms of nature, encouraging us to see the world in new and unexpected hues.
Read the behind the scenes Q&A - where Carry Somers chats with Harriet, our Textiles Researcher, about her new book and plans for the future.
1) The Nature of Fashion - what inspired you to write a book about the history of plant-based textiles and how reconnecting with past wisdom might help us to shape the future?
The roots of this book stretch back to A Textile Garden for Fashion Revolution at RHS Chelsea Flower Show, designed by Lottie Delamain. Kate Turnbull of The Secret Dyery joined us, and as we immersed ourselves in a world of botanical colour, it rekindled a passion that had never truly faded. Thirty years earlier, I had been about to embark on a PhD in natural dyes and the symbolism of colour in the Andes, but left it behind to pursue my brand, Pachacuti, after seeing the difference Fair Trade was making to the lives of Latin American producers. In its earliest iteration, this book was a plant compendium, a collaboration between the three of us. But in many ways those roots extend further, because several of these stories trace their origins to research carried out during my masters in Native American studies at the University of Essex.
When I departed Fashion Revolution at the end of 2022, with no plan for what to do next, I came back to a quote by one of my favourite writers, Eduardo Galeano. In his book Hunter of Stories, he describes why he writes, saying ‘I tried, I still try, to write about women and men who have a will for justice and an urge for beauty, unbound by the borders of maps and time, for they are my compatriots and my contemporaries, no matter where they were born or when they lived.’ This is where I found my inspiration for the form this book would ultimately take.
2) You talk about a Fibre Age in your book, and how this wasn’t part of our historical division of time. Can you expand on this?
Simple string played a powerful role in taming the world to human will, enabling the creation of snares, fishing lines, tethers, leashes, nets, handles, and ties. It allowed hard materials to be securely bound together, making possible the construction of more complex tools. In Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years, Elizabeth Wayland Barber dubs this the “String Revolution.”
The significant role of string in the story of humanity raises questions about whether archaeology may have overlooked the importance of textiles. Why isn’t there a Fibre Age in our historical divisions of time? This imbalance in archaeological findings is perhaps not surprising given the perishable nature of fibres, unlike more durable materials such as stone, antler, and bone, which receive more attention. Yet in rare environments like caves and burial sites where textiles have been preserved, they are often found in abundance. And of course, this lack of emphasis may also stem from the fact that textile production was primarily domestic work, carried out by women – for archaeologists have attributed this role to women, although it may not have been exclusively so – in pre-market societies.
While there may not be an era named after it, the spinning of thread and the invention of string undoubtedly rank among humanity’s most pivotal advancements, on a par with the creation of stone tools and the discovery of fire.
3) You highlight the spinning of thread and string as one of humanity’s most advanced inventions, mentioning that Homo sapiens sought not only survival but had an interest in beauty too. Why do you think this was?
As William Morris observed, beauty isn’t merely incidental to our lives, but a positive necessity. Our early ancestors in Dzudzuana Cave, Georgia, were not solely focused on survival: they sought beauty as well. The fibres found in the Caucasus foothills, dating back to around 34,000BCE, were more than utilitarian, their multiple colourways suggesting both an aesthetic appreciation and a cultural expression.
This interest in colour, in beauty, even at such an early stage in human history, speaks deeply to what it means to be human. The act of spinning thread and creating string was not only a technological breakthrough – it enabled early humans to spread out and inhabit almost every biome on our planet.
At the same time, it opened fresh opportunities for personal ornamentation, enabling people to signal group affiliation, mark status, or convey meaning through pattern and design. In this way, textiles became part of the shared language of a community, carrying cultural weight. The pursuit of beauty was not an indulgence, but a vital element of life, woven into the fabric of early societies.
4) You mention that deforestation for clothing and textiles has deep historical origins. However, in traditional societies like those in Papua New Guinea, respect for nature is fundamental to their way of living. Why do you think we are more distanced from the consequences?
When I began researching this book, I had placed the separation of humans and nature squarely on the shoulders of Enlightenment thinkers like Newton, Descartes and Bacon. These men, instrumental in shaping the modern Western worldview, effectively sanctioned our right to exploit the natural world in the name of material progress, reducing all non-human life to mere instruments of purpose. But now I see the rift began thousands of years earlier. At Çatalhöyük in modern-day Turkey, the desire for expansion, coupled with a growing appetite for goods, drove people deeper into the wilderness, clearing land, felling trees. In fact, the site’s lead archaeologist described Çatalhöyük as an early example of how the advent of farming ended our symbiotic relationship with nature.
The following story in my book is of Kuk in Papua New Guinea, showing how such transformations were not confined to one place. Here, people drained the swamp for cultivation. With time and experience, I imagine these early peoples would have come to understand the importance of balance and reciprocity, learning not to take too much or simply gather what was close at hand. They would see how careful harvesting helped the forest to flourish, reducing competition and allowing energy-giving light to flood in. And as wisdom grew, they wove it into their stories.
But stories need to be spoken. Ours have fallen silent. Today, we have become disconnected from the symbiotic relationship our ancestors once shared with the natural world. Distanced from the consequences, it becomes all too easy to dismiss the global impacts of our choices. According to Canopy, an organisation dedicated to conserving forest ecosystems, around three hundred million trees are logged every year to produce man-made cellulosic fabrics like viscose, often from our most ancient and endangered woodlands. That’s enough trees to encircle Earth seven times. Even trees from responsibly managed forests or fast-growing species like bamboo and eucalyptus are not the simple sustainable solution they might appear because the transformation from tree to textile comes with its own set of challenges.
Severed from their origins, the fibres in our clothing have lost their roots, just as we have lost ours. But what if we could rebuild our relationship with nature? What if we truly understood how deeply our lives are entwined with the world’s forests? What if we could speak these stories back into life? These are some of the questions that set me off on this journey.
5) You highlight how traditional techniques, plant dyes and materials have been copied and commercialised without consent for centuries. What do you think it will take to stop this kind of cultural appropriation and ensure respect for Indigenous and local communities in fashion today?
For too long, traditional techniques, plant dyes and materials have been copied and commercialised without consent, stripped from the communities that created them and reproduced with little regard for their origins. Copyright law, focused on individual originality, often fails to protect these cultural expressions, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation.
One of the main projects I have been working on over the past year is the CRAFTED Report, containing the Artisans’ Index, a collaboration between Keele University and League of Artisans, an Impact+ Innovation funded project. Our research found only 18% of the 50 fashion and homeware brands surveyed had a cultural appropriation policy and only 14% describe how free, prior and informed consent is obtained from artisans.
The path forward lies in reimagining how we engage with the sources of our inspiration. This means building genuine, long-term relationships with artisan communities, ensuring credit is given where it’s due and fair remuneration is part of every transaction. Collaborations are no longer tokenistic, but genuinely respectful and uplifting of traditional knowledge. When brands make the processes, people, and places behind their designs visible, they help to shift the power asymmetry that favours the corporate over creators. So let’s look towards the day where imitation is weeded out and authenticity can finally take root.
6) Your book displays a lot of textile theories around regeneration, circularity and more cooperative ways of working. There is a clear movement towards regenerative practices in the modern world - what do you think needs to be done to make this a viable option?
That’s a big question, and not one my book sets out to answer in a ‘how-to’ form, because The Nature of Fashion is storytelling, not a handbook. The word map derives from the Latin mappa, meaning a signal cloth or flag, and just as a flag marks direction, I believe these stories can help point the way forward.
The threads that connect us with plants are rarely simple or singular. When land is stripped bare and sapped dry, when profit eclipses people, they leave indelible scars. But we also see how such materials can restore what has been lost, regenerating ecosystems, enriching soils and strengthening communities. These stories resist simplification. What they can do, I hope, is invite us to look more closely, to question what we think we know. I certainly had some of my assumptions challenged, and overturned, through researching and writing this book. There are myriad ways forward; the challenge is in choosing how to weave these strands together so that the fabric of tomorrow is one that holds us all.
7) Now that the book is about to launch, what are your plans next?
The Nature of Fashion launches on 16 September in the UK and 11 November in the US. I have launch events at Waterstones Manchester and Waterstones Piccadilly and will be speaking at various events and literary festivals. Then in November, I’ll start a book tour in the US that begins at the UN Headquarters and the Rizzoli bookstore on Broadway, before moving on to Miami. I’m determined to savour these months around publication and see what new opportunities might emerge, whether for speaking engagements, writing commissions, consultancy, or other exciting projects. And a second book is already starting to take shape in my head…