The Local Cloth Project - Day 1

“I love quality. I love longevity. I love good design. I love ideas. I love this town. But most of all I love that I can wrap all these things up into a pair of jeans.”

This quote comes from David Hiatt, the founder of Howies, the sustainable clothing label who is now setting up a new venture called Hiut Denim, based in a town in Wales in the UK.

It encapsulates what I am trying to do on this short residency here at the Harvest Worksroom in East Brunswick – to explore through textiles and cloth, larger ideas around quality and craftsmanship, emotional attachment to products, and what it means to feel connected to a place, a location and to a community of people.

In Hiatt’s case, he has decided to set up a small denim brand in the town he lives in, in Wales. He discovered the town had a heritage of producing denim jeans – it had the last denim jeans factory to close in the UK - and has decided to revive the dying industry and bring back employment and skills training into the local community. He will only sell jeans – beautiful quality, well-made in the UK, jeans. Simple. The press images on his website, pre the launch of the collection, are not of models in sample garments but are of his farm, and his Landrover, and the owls that live in the barn next to his house.

His UK-based customers (although no doubt it will attract cult following world wide like many of these small, niche denim brands) will be willing to spend a premium amount to own a pair of jeans that have been made in their own country. The customer will feel connected to the jeans because they probably know someone very like the person who made these jeans in Wales, and they may even know the town. They understand the culture, the location and the way of working that produced the jeans. They may even feel a sense of national pride.

Hiut Denim is not the only clothing brand that has gone local. There is also Raleigh Denim in North Carolina in the US, set up by a young creative couple, to nurture the local denim industry, notably the Cone Denim Mill which has a very long history in the area. There is even a young guy in east London, near to where my studio is, who has set up ‘London’s first micro mill’. He has installed an industrial loom in his London studio, rescued from a closing mill up near Manchester. It’s called the London Cloth Company, and he is teaching himself how to weave woven tweeds.

Here at Harvest Textiles, I’m going to try to map these ideas of the local and what it means for Harvest and for the neighbourhood they exist in. In a way, this is a relatively easy site for investigation. Harvest are already a textile printing enterprise, who are aware of their ‘footprint’, and who have a positive impact socially (through their workshops and encouragement of local creatives). Also, the neighbourhood of East Brunswick, was actually the original site of most of Melbourne’s early textiles and garment production.

All of this is rich pickings for a design researcher. I have my new desk, and am sharing the space with a lovely group of people who are on the Summer School printing class for the week. You are welcome to come by and say hi if you are in the area and I would love to get any feedback or share a conversation about what local textiles means for you.