![]() ![]() “We had the chance to travel to India to see these regenerative farms, and they’re little paradises,” she says. “It’s very dramatic to find something that doesn’t just mitigate a problem, or reduce the impact of a problem, but it actually does something good.” Patagonia has now partnered with hundreds of farmers, many of whom are in India, where the debt cycle of agriculture can be especially harsh. “When we realized the power of soil sequestering carbon from the atmosphere, it was a real aha! moment,” Helena Barbour, the head of Patagonia’s sportswear, explains. The company spearheaded organic cotton in the early ’90s and has just released its first collection of T-shirts made from regenerative organic cotton from farms in India. Patagonia is out ahead of the movement, unsurprisingly. Photo: Ashish Chandra / Courtesy of Christy Dawn There’s a reason for that.”Ĭhristy Dawn designer Christy Peterson on the farm in India. “You never see just one crop in nature, you see a vast diversity. “It’s really mimicking what nature does already,” Baskauskas says. Regenerative farms also implement “pollinator strips” of crops that attract bees and butterflies to the area, or they’ll add “trap crops” to divert pests from their hero crops in lieu of chemical pesticides. On a cotton farm, there might be rows of snap peas planted as “cover crops” to shade the soil so it stays cool, absorbs more water, and thus grows more microbiomes. A regenerative farm is the complete inverse of that: Imagine acre upon acre of various different crops, many of them strategically planted to help each other grow and flourish. It probably looks normal to your eye, though not entirely natural, because it isn’t: Most of those farms use pesticides and other conventional methods, like deep tilling. The easiest way to understand regenerative agriculture is to first picture what you think of as a “typical farm”: It’s probably hundreds of acres of a single crop, like corn or cotton. Unlike Fisher, few of us have ever set foot on a farm, and the conventional-versus-regenerative agriculture debate doesn’t exactly come up at fashion shows. “Rather than just pollute less or do less harm, we can actually kind of revive the earth through the process of making clothes.” “I love this because this is one of the places where we can make a positive impact,” she said. Richard Malone picked up the International Woolmark Prize for his collaboration with a regenerative farm in India, and Eileen Fisher spoke at length about her new passion for regenerative farming in a recent Vogue interview. And because most of our clothes started as plants, “regenerative ag” is becoming a shiny new buzzword in the sustainable fashion conversation. In addition to omitting chemicals, regenerative agriculture actually replenishes and strengthens the plants, the soil, and the nature surrounding it. Baskauskas first understood it in the context of food and agriculture: Regenerative farming is essentially the new organic or sustainable farming, but it goes a few steps further. That’s where the word regenerative comes in. You never see just one crop in nature, you see a vast diversity. “It’s really mimicking what nature does already. “But it weighed on us that we weren’t part of the solution, either.” “For the first five years of our brand, we were super proud that we haven’t been part of the problem,” he said. They’ve built Christy Dawn into a modest business known for its sustainable efforts, namely their use of leftover deadstock fabrics in lieu of producing new textiles. Baskauskas and his wife, Christy Peterson, had that sharp realization last year. But an industry that’s “less bad” than it was before isn’t saying much. If designers produce smaller collections and consumers buy fewer things, it’s certainly an improvement on what we’ve been doing for decades. Even as we shift towards a more sustainable mindset, we can’t really say that anything we’re doing is “giving back” to the earth. That’s true of many industries, but especially fashion. “We’ve forgotten that we are nature, and because of that, we’ve extracted from the earth without giving back,” he adds. Those natural disasters he mentioned are the result of our climate emergency, but so is the coronavirus both are symptomatic of our fast-paced lifestyles and one-sided relationship with the planet. Now, Baskauskas’s words feel almost prescient. That conversation took place in early March, just before the coronavirus outbreak. “What are we trying to sustain-the fires, the tornadoes, the mass extinction? We don’t need to be sustainable, we need to be regenerative.” “The word sustainable is like a dinosaur now,” Aras Baskauskas, the CEO of Los Angeles label Christy Dawn, tells me on a recent call. ![]()
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