Growing your own clothes locally..

Biomimicry is the examination of nature, its models, systems, processes, and elements to take inspiration from in order to solve human problems.  Biomimicry can unlock secrets of evolution, new beginnings to textile design to emerge per Textile Futures chapter 5.  In the eyes of Suzanne Lee’s, to ‘grow your clothes’ is not necessarily using a field full of cotton or the wool off a sheep, but to literally growing bacteria in a bathtub of green tea and sugar to form to a mold.  This material also takes to dyes a lot easier than cotton and other materials, giving this an upper hand but this process is still under works because it is not waterproof, and in today’s world, we need water proof and sweat proof.  We may not use this for the apparel industry, but we could look into growing our furniture and household products so we could use less of cotton, a material that is harmful to the earth more sparingly.  Per the Textile Futures book, chapter 5 says that it can take decades for an article of clothing to decompose and as it does so, it releases deadly chemicals and harmful gases into the soil.  We cannot continue to throw our materials out and let our earth ‘take care of them’ because we are causing damage to it and ourselves.  With the grown materials, after they have reached the end of their lifecycle usage for us, we can dispose of them like our organic food and it will become compost, not causing any harm to our earth.  By growing our own clothing and forming it to what we need, we would build for durability and not overbuild, using materials sparingly. 

Another way to help our earth is to shop locally, by enhancing diversity, celebrating traditions, building your community, creating meaningful employment and respecting your local environmental conditions as stated in the Local and Light chapter.  With producing locally, it can give meaning and a change for distinctiveness and limited editions.  My only problem with shopping locally is seeing everyone else in the same clothing so in order to avoid this, small town producers should only produce one of each item in each size so it would be on a first come first serve basis and this will allow the producer to have free range on creativity.  By producing or growing our own materials locally, we would eliminate the transportation cycles that a textile goes through before even reaching the user.  When producing products, we need to look towards lightweight materials for a lower environmental impact, but we cannot look to do that to everything, because we will need warmth come winter time.  Also by shopping locally, you can buy organic produce and help farmers and gardeners out.  There would also be less shipping of produce and shipped produce is more than likely not grown organically.

To this day I feel that there are many entrepreneurs and fashion designers out there that we should be able to live locally and experience a great life by doing so and this would give more people the opportunity to express individuality.  We need to learn to trust in ourselves and our communities and grow sustainably together by using materials sparingly and shopping locally.