If plants have shaped fashion’s past, couldn’t they hold the secret to its future? Vivid, celebratory, impassioned and angry, The Nature of Fashion is an epic sweep through the history of how we learned to create clothing with plants, revealing how textiles have transformed the human world and our natural landscape.

More than just a story about plant-based fashion, The Nature of Fashion chronicles the plant stewards, obsessives, innovators and profiteers who have shaped what we wear. It is about the clash of worlds, voracious exploitation and silenced voices; about devotion, passion, blindness, idealism, greed and how clothing has separated us from nature.

Told through intimate vignettes into this past, each person, people group, plant and place is a thread in the fabric of the book, forging connections across place and time. And like weaving, as the story strands weave in and out, the pattern slowly emerges.

'From the Heart of the World, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the Kogui people thank Carry Somers for her important mission, which is intimately connected with our ancestral culture.
MaMo Sintana and MaMo Isuama Kunchaluintana, Kogui spiritual leaders

'More than a history of fashion, this is a fascinating unravelling of how fabric has shaped us and the world we live in.'
Arizona Muse, founder of DIRT, Earth activist and model

'Carry weaves an absorbing story of how we first fashioned clothes from plants and how we might once again work closely with the natural world. An unmissable book.'
Adam Clayton, U2

'This book is a delight. Carry raises thrilling questions about how techniques and materials now nearly extinct might be reimagined in a new world where technology can give nature a helping hand. The Nature of Fashion is both history and future in the same breath - I loved it.'
Sir Tim Smit, co-founder of The Lost Gardens of Heligan and the Eden Project

'Underpinned by both scholarly and historical research and chronologically mapped out from 41,000 bce to the current day, Carry's knowledge and storytelling empowers and spellbinds us. I am deeply moved.'
Caryn Franklin MBE, fashion and identity commentator