Hemp: the Next Big Thing in Sustainable Apparel?

If you’re into “sustainable” clothing (I use the word “sustainable” in quotations because it can mean so many different things to different people!) you may have noticed a recent upswing in hemp clothing; the happy coming together of legislation allowing more hemp production in addition to a cultural awareness of “sustainable” fibers in the fashion industry.

If you google “hemp clothing,” you’ll initially get what you imagine when you think of hemp clothing: small off-beat brands selling funky, fair-trade clothes (brands I love, by the way!). But you’ll also find some larger players start to emerge.

No surprise that Patagonia has a whole page of hemp clothing and a page dedicated to why it’s important to support hemp production now more than ever.

Toad & Co, a brand that had its beginning using scrap fabric to make cozy, multicolored fleece hats, also has its (multicolored) hat in the hemp ring. They even proclaim that the first American flag was made from hemp fibers!

So, why is hemp the next big thing?

Hemp, unlike cotton, is significantly easier to grow. It needs no synthetic pesticides (aka, it’s all organic) to keep it going, it needs significantly less water than cotton , AND it yields a bigger amount of usable fiber per acre as compared to cotton.

If hemp is so great, why are we just getting into it now?

The plain truth is that cotton is softer. Hemp is scratchy and stiff and not at all what consumers in the age of athleisure are looking for.

Hemp also has it’s challenges as a fiber. When it comes to manufacturing it, it can be very inconsistent in quality, resulting in more “artisanal” looking product that isn’t always what large manufacturers (or the consumers shopping those bigger brands) want.

The question is, how do we take a great fiber like hemp and turn it into something people want to wear? The conclusion seems to be, blend it into other fabrics like Tencel or recycled poly to get a softer handfeel with more applications.

For Levi’s, this means using the hemp yarn for the weft of the denim (the horizontal yarn, generally undyed and visible on the inside of your jeans), then using Tencel or Cotton as the warp yarn (the exterior yarn that’s dyed blue) to create that soft hand feel we’ve come to expect from our jeans. Levi’s is calling their hemp-blend denim “cottonized denim.” “Cottonized Denim” is a blend of (approximately) 70% hemp and 30% cotton plus some proprietary finishing treatments (involving lasers! How high tech!) to get a handfeel comparable to cotton.

Want to start shopping? Here are a few fav websites I came across (in addition to Patagonia & Toad & Co)

TenTree, a Canadian apparel company. You can filter the clothes by what sustainable fiber you’d like to shop for! https://www.tentree.com/collections/hemp-clothing

Poetry a British brand focused on sustainable fibers and close, long existing relationships with their manufacturers https://www.poetryfashion.com/