With supermarket shelves depleted of loo roll, endless deliverydelays, and a ship grounding that launched a thousand memes, the pandemic brought ‘supply chain’ into the common vernacular. Fashion, with its highly complex, outsourced and opaque supply chains, was one of the first industries to feel Covid-19’s effect when two of its biggest manufacturing hubs, Wuhan and northern Italy, were the sites of early and severe outbreaks. For all the fatalistic writing on fashion’s impact, waste and destruction and how to work our way out of it, there hasn’t been a deep look at how to improve the first link in that chain: fibre production.

Fashion expert Lucianne Tonti’s Sundressed looks at the (literal) fabric of the garment industry and how regenerative fibre farming can help revolutionise the future of clothing. Tonti’s engaging and well- researched book looks beyond sustainability to focus on the people and initiatives creating fibres and textiles that don’t just mitigate harm but also rehabilitate depleted land and local industries.

Each chapter is devoted to a natural fibre and views them through a lens similar to how we’ve come to see the food system: from farm to closet. Tonti starts with a garment made from that fibre in her own wardrobe – the properties of the fabric, the beauty and comfort of how it wears, the joy of dressing in it – and then works backwards to the farmers working to change its production. From roaming cashmere goatherds in Mongolia to Californian cotton farms and fields of flax in Belgium, Tonti interviews producers who are moving beyond current modes of industrial agriculture towards holistic land management that restores soil health and water cycles, and improves biodiversity.

Some of the most interesting case studies move even further down the supply chainto fibre processing and textile production, where scale matters. We learn about efforts to bring processing infrastructure back to where fibre is grown – wool in Australiaand cotton, hemp and linen in the United States – as well the creation of vertically integrated, socially responsible silk and hemp producers in China.

Sundressed is a rich, nuanced exploration of where our clothes come from and why that matters. As Tonti notes when hearing of a farmer’s success with regenerative farming practices, ‘it is a story of hope, and not hope based in recommendations to be more diligent about recycling plastic […] but a big, full-hearted hope.’

Natasha Theoharous is the graphic designer at Readings