A conversation with Rebecca Burgess

Halston on Netflix tells a familiar tale. The opening scene shows Roy Halston Frowick as a child in Des Moines, Iowa looking upon his family home, where inside his mother and father argue. In the next scene, he has made his mother a hat — to soothe or cheer her — and the role of clothing and accessories as a form of transformative escape is established. 

The narrative then jumps to 1961 when Halston has made a pillbox hat for Jacqueline Kennedy to wear to JFK's presidential inauguration. A singular genius, Halston has escaped his troubled childhood to become an arbiter of taste, a leader of fashion, and a success. Later in the episode, after he finds Joel Schumacher, who works for him, shooting speed, he says, "we're all a bit like little ships lost at sea. We've all been through a lot… Left our families, been rejected in one way or another." But he rallies the young man by explaining, "there's too much at stake here."

But is there a lot at stake? 

The show's premise is a rise and fall tale of the man who "redefined American fashion." When watching it, I began to think about the different ways we could tell this story. Fashion is so frequently dealt with as an aesthetic pursuit; we are all waiting for a new style to come along each season and change how we see ourselves and others — the wearing of clothing interlinked to the zeitgeist. It can be. But in the series, the importance put on the singular troubled male genius to create fashionable, commercially viable clothing is at times comical, and others times dark. 

To work through some other narratives, I want to bring light to making the clothes — not designing them. Halston's most commercially successful designs were created using Ultrasuede. First produced in 1970, the fabric is formulated by spinning polyester ultra-fine fibers together. It feels like natural suede, but it is resistant to stains and discoloration; it can be washed in a washing machine and resists pilling or fraying because it is combined with a polyurethane foam in a non-woven structure. New technologies indeed were fashionable at the time, however instead of this being related to genius, perhaps Halston's idea to use this fabric is more imbued in his understanding that people wanted convenient clothing that could be worn and washed. It was functional, and its use significantly impacted the move away from luxury clothing as precious.

The harsh hand of capitalism is addressed in the T.V. show as Halston goes into business with Norton Simon, Inc. Eventually, a licensing deal with J.C. Penneys impacts his status as a luxury brand — department stores such as Bergdorf Goodman stopped stocking his clothes as they felt the mass-market designs had cheapened them. There is a fine line between making luxury crinkle proof and washable for society ladies to wear to do the school run and dressing the whole of America. But what was Halston's measure of success? Did he want to change fashion or become rich? Are they the same thing? The great fashion designer has long dreamed of being swept up by a luxury conglomerate, but we know it so often ends in tragedy, as it did for Halston. 

My final point on Halston is how we readily accept the role of a man dressing women. Halston is shown to save Liza Minelli from her childlike clothing, performing the classic duckling to swan transformation. Why is it that the lion's share of stories told in popular culture about fashion focus on the way men revolutionized the way women dress?

Interviewing Rebecca Burgess, weaver, natural dyer, and the executive director of Fibershed — a network of regional fiber systems that build soil and protect the health of our biosphere — might have intensified my thoughts toward Halston. Hearing about her work made it all the more ludicrous to think that we continue to detach fashion from the way it is made and its broader cultural impact. 

Shonagh Marshall: Could you start by telling me about your ancestry and how that has impacted the work that you do?

Rebecca Burgess: It started with an awareness that my family has been in the same area since the mid-1890s. For Americans, that's a long time, especially for California. Given that I had cultural continuity when it came to the topography. I had an innate familiarity with the waterways, the hillsides, and the mountains. 

As I got older, I started to dive deeper into really knowing the names of all the plants and the animals. I did not grow up in a family of formal horticulturalists, ethnobotanists, or native plant aficionados. Still, it's like becoming native to a place for a European settler. I think it takes a lot of time. There weren't a lot of indicators, or support systems, in school. We didn't learn all the native plant names, the relationships between migratory patterns of different birdlife, their relationship with blooming cycles, soil types, and fertility cycles — none of that was ever discussed. But I think the platform that my ancestors provided was at least one of topographical continuity. At least in my generation, I was provided the ability to dive deeper and not just see the landscape superficially. I could look beyond: that's a nice tree studded hillside, that's a beautiful walking trail, some wildflowers are coming up. It was more getting to dive deeper into the rhythms of seasonal pulses, bloom cycles, senescence, and the names of animals and plants. 

I can't say I was handed a booklet, oral or written, of how to engage with this landscape — far from it. But I was at least familiar enough and comfortable enough in my place and loved it enough to learn more about it. It's different than someone coming here as part of a job or a career, a marriage, or, that sounds cool — I'm moving to Northern California. I meet a lot of those people. They sometimes have profound academic histories from studying either forestry or fire cycles — there are some great academically trained newbies who do interesting work. But there's always something that's palpably missing. It's detectable by others; it's not just detectable by me. The community sees the difference between asking me questions about the landscape and asking an expert. There's something we know that I can't put my finger on. I get asked all the time to consult, and I have no formal training. 

Shonagh: You are a weaver and natural dyer; what inspired you to learn these crafts?

Rebecca: I had a roommate my sophomore year. She was a young woman my age, who was a first-generation college student from Peru. She and I were walking past a craft center, and she was able to look at a woven textile. Firstly she knew it was woven, and she knew that it was made from warp and weft thread. She understood the color scheme and how the yarns were dyed to create a pattern. 

I was 19, and all I had ever seen in textile was: What color is this? How does it look on me? That was as far as it had gone. I had never thought, Is this a knit? Is this a woven textile? What's the fiber? What's the dye? Incredibly, I was a 19-year old that had entered a land-grant university, and I had no understanding that a textile is an agricultural product. I'd been on the planet almost 20 years at that point. It's mind-blowing that we are raising — I don't know if the education system is still this asinine — people who don't understand materials. Materials are the driver of the economy, which are the drivers of climate change and exploitation. If you don't understand your electronics, your house paint, your siding, your heating system, your textiles — from what you wear to sleep to your shower curtain — and what those things are made out of, you consume them without thought. This is what is driving climate change. It is causing climate migration, destabilization on every level, slavery, indentured servitude, soil health depletion, water effluent contamination, asthmatic air conditions in urban environments. I mean, you name it, it's about what you're consuming. This doesn't mean I think that it's everyone's personal behavior that has to make the change. I think it's a combination of significant shifts in governmental policy and awakeness. But I don't think policy can shift without awakeness. 

Anyway, how did I get into dyeing and weaving? I realized how stupid I was. It wasn't stupidity that was due to an inability to grasp concepts. It was that I had never been exposed, and I realized how bereft I was of actual reality. So I just started teaching myself, and then I started taking craft classes, which are called craft, and they're not part of your academic training. They're foisted in this little section of campus that you have to pay additional money to expose yourself to — they're costly, time-consuming, and hard to get to. Yet, that is what your whole academic training should be tethered to — how things are made and the implications. The question should be, how do you learn all the other academic subjects through the lens of material systems? That's, to me, the more critical approach to education, instead of learning all the concepts and then abstractly applying those concepts onto material methods. We're never using reality to extrapolate concepts — maybe someone did and then wrote a textbook, and then we get to read the book.

My driver was an awareness of ignorance and genuine concern that it had gone that far — I was so superficially attracted to clothing, without knowing what they were. I thought that seemed dangerous. If you scale up my ignorance, that's a whole society of ignoramuses making very bad decisions. 

Shonagh: It is, and the fashion industry and its lure have only gotten bigger since you were studying. There is a complete disconnect between clothing production and the way it is marketed and sold. Why do you think this is? Do you think there is something sinister going on?

Rebecca: Colonization is a massive driver of this situation. If you're forced out of your indigeneity — your indigenous heartbeat — and you're forced into something that pulls you from your landscapes or pulls you away from natural processes, it's often done through violence. So I do think there's something more sinister going on. I don't believe that it's always the fault of every individual. I think there are some perpetrators over history; all it takes is one bad apple to influence whole systems. I believe we have a system of many very gentle people in the world who want to cooperate. Then we have a few very aggressive people, they're generally given the weapons, and they're generally men, yet empowered by very greedy women, too. I do think when you remove people from a place; they are disempowered. Suppose you lose your land, language, and understanding of when to harvest what plant to survive for your own needs. In that case, you get increasingly more dependent on the economic system that someone's created for your medicine, food, and transportation, and I think there's a slippery slope to disconnecting from reality.

Again, I don't blame every person who's this color or that color; it's deep in the human experience. Of course, it shows up in North America very blatantly around race lines, which are very tied to colorism. But it doesn't show up like that everywhere in the world, colorism does, but there are more subtle things going on. Take the Indian caste system; what do we attribute that to?

There's a great quote from a woman from the northern Minnesota tribe; I think she's Ojibwe, who was interviewed by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. She said something that we have to move into a system that retains people's sovereignty at all levels. And anytime we come into a position where we are cued to dominate and extract something we want from a person or an ecosystem, we must pass.

Shonagh: You have thought deeply about how and what we extract from the natural environment. In 2009 you decided to only wear clothes from fiber grown, woven, and sewn within your bio-region of northern central California. What inspired you to try this out, and what did you find during the challenge? 

Rebecca: Well, the reasons for doing it are centered on my last answer about why I think this has happened — colonial exploitation, taking away sovereignty from plants, animals, and people to get what you want to extract from them. To approach that is super complicated in our world. So I've been playing with that and what it means to have reciprocity? It would require knowing where everything's coming from because if I can't say where it's coming from, how would I define reciprocity? 

That was the start of understanding sourcing. The sourcing was in my backyard because it was essential to me to be in familiar topography and understand how my landscape could support me. Colonization is also often driven by people overriding the ecological carrying capacity. If you go back to pre-colonization, you have people disrupted by trauma; they were attacked, so now they attack someone else. Or they run out of something — food, water, labor — or they get overpopulated. 

I wanted to know what the ecological carrying capacity is in my region. How many textiles could be produced in this region, given the human population? And the answer I found by dressing myself and asking questions about wool and cotton production, which were just the low-hanging fruits, was surprising. I'm not a huge fan of how those crops are grown in a commodity system, but it's far better than fossilized carbon materials; I would vote any day of the week for cotton over polyester, wool over acrylic. Anyway, when I looked at the natural fiber systems in my community and how much they produced, we're making enough cotton for 40 million Californians to each get 11 pounds of cotton per year. That's 20 shirts — much more than you need. 

Shonagh: Did Fibershed grow from this project? Could you tell me more about what Fibershed is and why you founded it? 

Rebecca: Fibershed turned into an organization that connects a producer network group, the people who grow these raw materials and process them, we find out who and where they are. We also realize there are significant gaps in the system that, if resolved or manufactured towards a solution through jobs and machinery, could dress more people locally.

Environmental justice communities in California often ask me, If we were to do this in California, won't we put more pressure on our ecosystem? I answer by asking whose ecosystem is going to clothe you? Cotton is grown in arid regions. It is produced in very water constrained systems, probably 9 times out of 10 — maybe minus the southeastern part of the United States or the pakucho cotton grown on the edge of the rainforest in Peru. There's a handful of places, but it's traditionally grown in arid environments, even as we were developing. It was irrigated in Egypt for 5000 years. It's always been an irrigated crop, and because it's very pest sensitive and pests love to grow in warm, moist environments, it does well in arid climates. 

So Fibershed deals with these tensions around how you create the materials. It's become an organization that connects the producer community and works politically to help understand where we need to improve incentives to better how those production practices occur. I love it when activists come up to me — they're head to toe and cotton — and tell us we can't grow cotton. I say, Then maybe you should take your clothes off! That's how I feel about that juxtaposition. If you care about climate change, you can't wear plastic — what are you going to wear?

Shonagh: So what do you think we should wear? Secondhand?

Rebecca: Yes. Secondhand clothing is absolutely 100% critical. It has to be paired with healthier virgin fiber production systems, nonchemical recycling of textile, and wear the crap out of your clothes — don't buy anything. It all has to come together. We need better distribution, healed soils, and virgin fibers coming off the landscape. 

Here's an example: wool. California is the largest wool producer in the United States, and we don't use that wool, by and large, because it comes from people who are eating mutton or lamb — wool is considered a byproduct. Cotton is also often thrown into a crop rotation with processing tomatoes, fresh-to-market tomatoes, or corn.

Cotton is not in itself ever considered the crop; you're not a cotton farmer; you are a food farmer who throws cotton into your rotation. We need those systems healed because if we go after healed and restored landscapes, we're tackling the food and the fiber system. We need to heal agricultural systems. Whatever ends up pulsing off that landscape, whether it's a byproduct or part of a dynamic crop rotation like cotton, we need to manufacture it. We cannot let that go to waste; there should be no waste products. And we should aim for the highest value for all byproducts coming off agricultural lands, and agricultural lands need to be restored to eliminate synthetic chemistry and build soil organic carbon.

So Fibershed works a lot on those policies around incentivizing farm supports, healing soil, and reducing synthetic chemistry. Then we do education as a nonprofit: we network the producer community and work to incentivize much better farm practice. We help them fund that as best we can and help connect them to the market to break out of oddity markets. Then we do public education. And we also do research, if there's something we don't know we pay someone at a land grant university to help us figure it out. Like what is the impact of sheep in a vineyard system? Or a pear orchard? What are the carbon consequences of that? Or how much plastic from our clothing is in the San Francisco Bay? Let's go figure that out; if it hasn't been figured out — let's give some more funding to the 5Gyres Institute to help do it. So it's research, networking, policy, and technical assistance. That's what the organization has become. Because we want to take responsibility for ourselves in the world and do that, you have to think about the whole system.

Shonagh: In these newsletters, I have been focusing on degrowth in fashion. Within this framework, I have realized how important local is. This emphasis on local is relevant to the work that you have been doing with Fibershed. In California, what does local production look like compared to what the U.K. can grow and make, for example? Do you imagine a changed world where we will travel to different regions, and people will once again be wearing different clothes based on what they can grow? 

Rebecca: It's an aesthetic driver, as much as it is an ecological driver. I don't travel on airplanes anymore because of my relationship with the climate, but when I did it's been soul-crushing to see an H&M in China and then in Europe and San Francisco. You see the same stupid aesthetics plastered worldwide, at a price that none of us can afford to pay for in the actual cost of exploiting labor and the consequences of that exploitation over time ecologically.

I think about what a place-based aesthetic is going to look like. I think that would be a tremendous contribution to the new world we're trying to create — if we have visual cues at the community level. You see it in different cultures like, in northern Thailand, for example. When I went to various ceremonies there, where the community celebrated rice harvest or tamarind harvest, they were all wearing clothes that they had woven and dyed. Most indigenous cultures have relegated their traditional garb to ceremonies, and daily wear is now somewhat convoluted with our export markets of used clothing that's saturated the world over. So you still see some of that place-based aesthetic through the ceremony of indigenous cultures.

But what if you modernized that narrative to say we do have efficient technologies that are mechanical. They're not biological engineering of synthetic biology — 3D printing in your home with algae that you feed sugar. I know the singular universities and the Silicon Valley's of the world want us to print our clothing. So as a counterforce, even to that, there are more appropriate technologies. Technologies that would enable a community to benefit from them in terms of their profit and create more jobs.

An example is micro spin equipment out of India, which processes around 20,000 pounds of cotton per year. It's great if you want to grow like 10 acres of cotton. We produce 2 million acres of cotton in California. Instead, what if we grew like pockets of these well-honed 10-acre sites, and every little community had micro spin equipment. They could then make button-down shirts, T-shirts, and maybe even denim in California. People could then do their dye work at home. They buy undyed and greige or start growing colored cotton, and they buy it brown or green. California could be a sea of naturally colored cotton pieces. Cotton could begin to be developed in agroforestry systems amongst mulberry and fig trees instead of these monocultures. We are working on an agroforestry system in the San Joaquin Valley for that. In this situation, you'd be eating better — nutrient-dense foods — you'd have more tree-cropped species, and you'd be growing and wearing more colored cotton. 

Then if you went to England, I'm supposing you'd be wearing Romdales and Shetland wool and heirloom conservation breed bulls. Then you would have gorgeous linens. We would trade with each other — I'm not against it — but trade has to come from each other's strengths; trade has to come from each other's bounty, not our deficits. 

Shonagh: You touched upon the tech fixes being developed within fashion and textiles; what do you think about these approaches? Will they work? 

Rebecca: The tech space creates economic disparity at levels we've never seen before, at least in the United States. I think what people don't understand is, let's say, it's a new material, and it promises to rid the oceans of all the microfiber plastic pollution — Bolt Threads and other companies making spider silk — they will say we can make something durable that competes with plastic. But their supply chain is a mess in terms of emissions, and they don't acknowledge that at all. Some investors don't ask those questions — about the 2,4-D corn feedstocks, GMO sugar beet feedstocks, or synthetic nitrogen that will be used on the fields. It's far more fossil fuel-intensive to make and creates nitrous oxide emissions on-site anyway. 

None of this is in their Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) because they are too distanced from the land base to understand the true impact and cause-and-effect reality. The problem is the economy is not in an actual cause-and-effect space right now — we're printing money. We have incredible subsidy systems for Silicon Valley, for example, the lack of taxes that these guys pay through tax credits. We have paved the road for them; we have our chariot out and are letting them run down this golden path that we have labored for. They're taking advantage of our roads, air, and water; they are externalizing all these costs. New technologies come in, and they are developed in that growth model.

A number of things are sinister about them. They capitalize on all the social structures. They take the best and the brightest from the public schools to run their white-collar positions. They recruit from lower funded communities that have been disinvested and extract for their distribution centers. They never address the wealth gap — new technologies exacerbate wealth gaps. And the reason for that is because venture capital is required at large scales for these technologies to become market viable, and often they're not, and they float on venture capital for decades. With Bolt Threads, I think they're in their $400th million for spider silk and vegan leather that's coated with polyurethane. They owe so much money. They owe the CEOs that get PhDs from Stanford that rally around their family table and they ask for this money. This is the community I live in. These people ante up all this money, and the neoliberals feel so good about donating to their friend's son's startup that's getting the oceans rid of plastic. Then they want their money back, and the rate of return is what drives the exploitation. It means they can't regenerate the farmlands that produce the feedstocks for the E. coli that they've genetically engineered. 

No one's putting this together: that they are reliant on extractive transportation systems, extractive farming systems, extractive labor systems, and extractive wealth capitalization of their businesses. And then they try to preach that they're going to solve the ocean plastics problem. This is what I have to live around. And it's just a noxious and untethered from reality. These are lies, and yet it's heralded as a solution to my face all the time.

Shonagh: What are your conversations like with brands? How do you persuade them to do things differently?

Rebecca: Most of the work that we're doing or I feel like I have to do when I'm trying to take a brand who's been buying adulterated cotton, that they're calling GOTS, from India. Is to tell them you can't get organic cotton that cheap! Of course, they could not give you that quality at that price, because it doesn't exist. 9 times out of 10, what I'm doing with the brands, is bringing them back to reality and explaining you weren't even buying organic cotton. 

I explain I would like them to support farmers in their home terrain. To support the development of our social democracy in the United States by building out a manufacturing sector based on renewable energy, small scale, and just providing some value-added jobs. Otherwise, we're going to continue this export economy — maritime shipping isn't even modeled in the IPCC data — you're going to keep contributing blindly to this globalized system. Why don't you come home? Take responsibility. Work with some growers here and help them improve their systems through an investment model such as a point of sale percentage on your finished goods that goes back to the farm. That's what we should be modeling.

The cost is a conversation. These companies were buying cotton for 1 dollar 80 a pound. In California, if growers weed the field twice in an organic cotton system, the organic cotton is already at $4 a pound because we pay $15 an hour minimum wage, which people are saying is not enough. In India, if you buy a farm, it comes with people. People are embedded in the purchase price. That's the caste system. They're talking about this wonderful hand-picked organic cotton, which was dependent on the Indian caste system. Wake up!

Shonagh: There will be a spike in the price of clothing if regenerative farming practices and fair labor are employed. Some people argue that this is unfair because lower-income individuals and families will not have cheap fashionable clothing. What is your opinion on this?

Rebecca: Cotton should probably be $10 a pound, not 80 cents. The brands shouldn't exist. That's my opinion. I think you should just have farms that are doing everything to care for — in our community — the salmon habitat, air emissions, building soil carbon, producing habitat for migratory birds, letting the elk rewild, and bringing the wolves back. We need to have pockets of agriculture that hold their own in this wildland interface; right now it is just destroyed, there are no wildlands to interface with — except very far north or deep into the mountains. We have to bring the wild closer in; it's going to be harder to farm, you're going to have incredible losses of sheep and alpaca. Farming will have to become more humanized, and more people are going to have to get involved. It's going to have to shrink if it's going to be done right. I have looked at this thing inside and out. People will tell you; we'll just put robots in the field; we'll have artificial intelligence. That will happen. But the other track will be people humanizing the space. 

In this humanizing track, because of the conservation movements in the climate movement, you will have the wildlands coming back. Agriculture will receive pressure because of changes in policy people don't want — they want to rewild the land. People want the fish to return. They want the great herds to return. They don't realize how hard it will be to do and still produce food and fiber. However, I think we can do it. But we need more people living on land, which means you can't have a speculative real estate market where people can't afford to live. You need land trusts. You need people to live in housing that's proximal to where they're managing and stewarding that land, and they cannot be struggling with these crazy mortgages. You need districts that are agriculture districts with land trusts. I think you could pulse very high-quality food and fiber off those systems. But that material will be costly, and you're going to have major secondhand markets. 

But you asked a bigger meta question. Aja Barber answered that well on Instagram; she tackled what you are asking about: ruining the democratic nature of aesthetics. She said if it is not fair if the prices go up, who is this not fair to? The farmers, the land, the air, or the people sewing your clothes? The one sector of the economy that is yapping about fairness are the people that want what they want, when they want it, at the price they want it at. The consumer class has ignored everyone else who produces what they wear, and this system is not fair or democratic to these producers.