American cotton, branded and traced back to the farms that grew it, adds another dimension to the trackable movement, albeit with plenty of question marks.
New York menswear designer Todd Snyder’s Spring 2021 collection includes denim made in a manner that might be called farm-to-closet. His $300 selvedge jeans will use fabric woven at a Louisiana mill using so-called e3 sustainable cotton that can be traced back to the American farm fields where it was grown.
Snyder is one of a number of designers and brands that believe consumers will respond positively to discovering the origins of their apparel by tracking them through the supply chain.
To date, fashion labels haven’t capitalised much on the farm-to-table movement that has transformed the food business. But fashion and food often cater to the same socially conscious consumers, and brands including Rag & Bone, Wrangler and Imogene & Willie are now preparing farm-to-closet collections built around trackable American cotton.
The question is whether this clever marketing to the environmentally conscious consumer could be scaled to the volumes to compete with cotton milled and sewn into apparel in China, which is responsible for nearly a quarter of cotton apparel and fabric sold in the US.
Tracking cotton is not entirely new — for example, Applied DNA Sciences is able to track cotton from the gin, though not back to individual farms, through its CertainT platform. That may lack the same heart-tugging consumer appeal, but it enables brands to certify the quality of cotton they are using, such as more luxurious pima varieties that are important to luxury bedding manufacturers. The new marketing initiative — using branded e3 Sustainable cotton that was introduced in 2013 — features cotton that has been meticulously traced back to farms that grew it, tracking its environmental impact through cotton gins and textile mills. It’s billed as sustainable due to its relatively low water and chemical needs and because it is entirely grown and manufactured in the US, sometimes travelling only a few dozen miles in its journey from plant fibre to cloth. As a result, it offers up Instagram-friendly images of its farmers tilling soil and American looms weaving fabric.
It’s part of an unusual approach to selling seed developed by the German industrial giant BASF Corp., and it represents an unusual marriage of 21st century cloud technology and 18th century industrial cooperation.
Beyond the likely consumer appeal, the cotton-tracing technology offers a rare opportunity to fashion brands: the ability to measure, rather than loosely estimate, the relative carbon footprint of a textile. That has broad implications for fashion labels investing in carbon tracking and offsets.
“It kind of is next-level sustainability,” says Snyder, who is known for his elevated American classic looks such as cashmere twill shirts. “Our customer just really responds to authenticity. They want to know where it came from,” he adds, admiring the way the restaurant industry has pivoted to farm-to-table cuisine. “We want to be very granular in the same way.”
Rag & Bone founder and designer Marcus Wainwright is designing e3 selvedge denim for autumn 2021. He plans to build the marketing around the farms and a Vidalia, Louisiana mill that is working exclusively with e3 cotton. “It’s hands that make this stuff,” Wainwright says. Fashion’s complex supply chains often make it difficult to show whose hands are involved.
Wrangler has already produced and sold a limited-edition e3 denim collection called Wrangler Rooted. After the initial supply sold out at about $100 a pair, Wrangler plans to continue with more designs, believing the e3 denim will appeal to Gen Z and city-dwelling consumers. The label, owned by Greensboro, NC-based Kontoor Brands, which reported $2.5 billion in revenues in 2019, hopes to broaden its rural customer base. “It’s universally appealing across all demographic groups,” says Roian Atwood, Wrangler’s director of sustainability. “We’ve traditionally been in a Western wear channel. We want to be included in modern wear.”
Donny Lassiter, whose family farms grow peanuts, wheat and pumpkins in North Carolina, owns a pair of Wrangler Rooted jeans made with his own cotton. Each pair bears his silkscreened signature on an inside pocket and an embroidered map of North Carolina on a front pocket. “It’s almost a surreal thing,” says Lassiter. “It’s not something you ever expect to have a chance to do, growing a commodity.”
Ludwigshafen, Germany-based BASF, which reported €59.3 billion in 2019 revenues, originated the e3 programme, as well as similar programmes in Greece and Brazil, as a way to sell more cotton seed. The US pilot got a boost because the US Department of Agriculture tracks individual 500-pound bales of cotton after it emerges from the gins that separate out the fluffy fibres. That made it possible to track cotton through mills that agree not to mix e3 batches with other cotton, and on to the brands that buy cloth from the mills.
Tracing the cotton backward to farms was trickier until Wrangler’s Atwood met a tech entrepreneur and Indiana farmer named Chris Fennig, based in Portland, IN, who had created a cloud-based platform called MyFarms. The platform was designed to help farmers track field management efficiency. It uses satellite photography, farm data inputs and other information to record water usage, herbicides and a plethora of other information, including topsoil erosion — a key factor in sustainability.
Genetic modification: Is it a problem?
Cotton has long been controversial as proponents of sustainability and organics battle over the best ways to manage its water needs, which can be prodigious, and the frequent use of herbicides. The e3 cotton seeds have been genetically modified (itself, of course, controversial) at a Texas laboratory to reduce their need for water and herbicide.
MyFarms’s data from last year found that 78 per cent of e3 cotton put more carbon into soil than it released into the atmosphere, Fennig says. Soil erosion was massively reduced: nearly half of e3 acreage lost less than a ton of soil per acre, compared with 10 to 20 tons per acre for non-e3 cotton, Fennig and BASF say. The concept of low-carbon cotton, they say, is now within reach.
Still, genetically modified seeds may be a step too far for companies that have built organically grown cotton into their brand ethos, like Patagonia and Pact. (BASF says it sells organic cotton seeds in Greece, where GMO seeds are banned.) “Organic. I can trust it. I know it,” says Brendan Synnott, chief executive of Boulder, Colorado-based Pact, which manufactures its apparel overseas in fair-trade certified factories. “It doesn’t just make the problem go away because you know where it came from.”
Connecting with fashion brands
As it pressed farmers to buy its e3 seed, BASF worked its way up the supply chain to build a vertical market. It began paying farmers a $2.50 per bale incentive (cotton currently sells for about $350 per bale) to participate with the necessary record keeping and other requirements. BASF located cotton gins and mills and ultimately hired a New York fashion publicity firm, Maguire Steele, to connect with fashion brands.
In October 2019, BASF’s agronomic solutions advisor, a longtime seed saleswoman named Jennifer Crumpler, hosted a “Farm to Fashion” event in Louisiana, inviting fashion design teams to tour farms and Vidalia Mills. At dinner, eight farmers sat at tables with several dozen designers and brands. Many had never before met a farmer, or vice versa. The event led to a number of the collections that will launch next year, while several mass retail brands are currently testing the cotton fabric. Plans for a second 2020 Farm to Fashion dinner were cancelled because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Crumpler says the meeting dispatched creatives’ preconceived notions of farmers. Several mistook Marshall Hardwick, a 33-year-old cotton grower with a laid-back ease and long hair, for a designer. “He didn’t wear overalls,” Crumpler laughs. Hardwick operates the 8,000-acre Hardwick Planting Co. in northern Louisiana with his 38-year-old brother Mead. They post beauty shots of the farm to Instagram, and take easily to quantifiable methods of tracking their business performance.
“If you’re not in agriculture, it’s very hard to be around it. We’re isolated,” says Marshall Hardwick, tugging on his shirt on a Zoom call. “But people have more of an interest to know where this shirt comes from.”
Rather than criss-crossing oceans, Hardwick e3 cotton travels 15 miles to the Tensas Co-op Gin where the fibres are cleaned and baled before heading another 40 miles south to Vidalia Mills to become fabric.
Mead, who has promised to provide his extended family with jeans made of Hardwick cotton, sees it as an important move away from the age-old risks of growing commodities. “We began to think, well, maybe we can start relationships with the end user — the apparel brands,” he says.
Chris Rosaasen, chief executive of Los Angeles-based K2Omnivision, which produces celebrity fashion drops including actor Will Smith’s Bel-Air Athletics collection and the Travis Scott McDonald’s denim, says his business partner returned from the Farm To Fashion dinner last October with a plan and a new slogan: “We go from seed to fan.”
In November, K2Omnivision will launch elevated basics such as e3 cotton tees and sweats, using QR codes inside the garments that link to a web-based dashboard tracing the clothing’s origins. “We were going from fabric to fan,” says Rosaasen. “We didn’t even know we could go back to the seed.”
Source: https://www.voguebusiness.com/