There’s a familiar story about the slow food, farm-to-table movement: a story about slowing down to embrace seasonal produce, small farmers, good health, and the environment; it’s about buying fresh, local produce from farmers directly at local farm stands, farmers’ markets, or CSAs, and putting it on our own kitchen tables.
Similarly, another story is told about slow fashion, fiber’s farm-to-closet movement: a story about slowing down production and processes, deepening relationships with small farmers and artisans, utilizing climate-beneficial agriculture in regional fiber and artisanal networks that nurture fiber from plants and animals to skin and back to the soil again.
As in the slow food movement, the slow fashion movement emphasizes fewer processes, fewer ingredients, and buying local.
These fiber stories are being told via regional fiber systems, called fibersheds, all across the globe. They transform communities, actively work to form and deepen relationships, and decentralize textile systems. They’re rooted in systems of regeneration, not in the exploitation of people or the planet.
Mary Ann Stewart 