Future Fashion Landscapes: Fostering biodiversity through collaborations between farmers, designers, and processors of native and rare breed wool

Fashion and agriculture are among the industries with the highest climate footprint – through over consumption of finite resources, aggregated CO2 emissions, widespread ecosystem pollution and resulting extensive biodiversity loss.

This design-led R&D partnership between researchers from Centre for Sustainable Fashion and South East England and South West England Fibreshed supports Fibreshed’s mission to revalue UK wool and create short, transparent bio-regional fibre and fashion supply networks with potential for replication. Wool is still produced in the UK in abundance, but it is chronically undervalued, underutilised and often destroyed through lack of markets.

The project addresses one of the key barriers for advancement of bio-regional fibre and textiles ecosystems and economies - the lack of links, common language and mutual understanding of requirements and production cycles between farmers, designers and processors.

Two branches of the Fibreshed UK organisation are partners in the Future Fashion Landscapes project: South East England Fibreshed (SEEF) and South West England Fibreshed (SWEF) represented by their respective Directors Deborah Barker and Emma Hague. Fibreshed is a global grassroots organisation developing regional fibre systems that builds both ecosystem and community health. It brings together farmers, manufacturers, practitioners and designers to reignite localised textile industries through regenerative practices and processes.