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

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.

As the centuries unfold, we meet plants from every continent and understand the human stories of origin, culture and community. We see people and countries interact through trade, conflict, human and land exploitation and the age-old struggle for riches and power.

The stories of yesterday find their echoes in today. In every culture and every place, each plant is part of an ecosystem, and we see how the choices we once made shape landscapes and economies today.
Amidst human folly shine strands of hope and resilience, cultures that have maintained their textile traditions, human artistry that works in rhythm with the natural world and innovators who are finding new ways to produce fibres and dyes.

For thousands of years our clothes have been made by working with nature, not against it. Fashion is at a turning point - to look forward, we need to look back.

Author: Carry Somers
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing UK
Published: 11/04/2025
Pages: 304
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.00w x 1.30d
ISBN: 9781915294791


Review Citation(s):
Foreword 10/17/2025
Booklist 11/01/2025

About the Author
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.