February in Fashion, Condensed.
Happy sheep = better wool, scaling next-gen fibres, and are lab-grown materials all hype or the future of fashion?
Hello there,
Thanks for your patience this month as I return to London from my usual winter escape to Australia! To say the state of fashion in 2025 is bleak would be a significant understatement. Instead of getting into all that, I wanted to share a story to shine a little bit of hope into your March.
Last November, I wrote that my goal was to visit more farms in 2025. While home in Australia in December, I got the opportunity to visit Prospect Pastoral, a regenerative wool and wheat farm in Western Australia’s Wheatbelt region (about 3 hours inland from Perth, my hometown) with fellow fashion journalist Lucianne Tonti and a photographer friend who took the arial shot of sheep you’ll see below.
It was probably one of the most inspiring work trips I’ve ever taken. We spent hours driving around the 65,000 acres of farmland that Di and Ian Haggerty have carefully regenerated over the last 30 years while Di told us about their life on the farm.
While her Kelpie Sassy snoozed between Lucianne and I on the back seat, we learnt about the ways in which Di and Ian have integrated the teachings of Australia’s First Nations people into their regenerative agriculture practices, and the lifelong trial and error process of farming without pesticides, insecticides or any of the toxic chemicals found on industrial farms. We watched as their landscape hummed with life — kangaroos, emus, multicoloured ringneck parrots, blue-banded bees and thousands of fat and happy sheep — it was in stark contrast to the desolate farms that surround Prospect, many of which are crippled by the semi-arid climate, high soil salinity, and insufficient rainfall.
Visiting the farm lead to the Vogue Business story you see below. After the trip, I continued to meet regenerative sheep farmers across the country, from Tasmania, South Australia, and New South Wales. They generously answered my questions, shared their hopes and concerns for the wider wool industry (which last year produced the lowest volume of wool in 100 years), and elaborated on how regenerative wool could bring this struggling sector back from the brink.
Their vision is ambitious, but crucially, it makes a lot of sense. They spoke about unlocking financing that can fund regenerative farming initiatives, setting up trusts to ensure their farms remain nature-positive long into the future, working directly with fashion brands to tell the stories of their incredible wool, and collaborating with conventional wool farmers to make education on regenerative agriculture accessible and achievable to more.
Prospect Pastoral and the other farms I covered in this piece are a million miles away from the luxury fashion retailers where their beautiful wool is sold as jumpers, coats and accessories. Despite this, they’re presenting solutions that the whole industry could benefit from — large-scale decarbonisation, increased biodiversity and water retention and reduced reliance on chemicals at the raw material level. It’s a reminder that many of the solutions to fashion’s problems come from those on the ground, if only we take the time to listen. Read more at the link below!
On that note, see you next month.
Meg
Sustainable Fashion Forum Fireside Chat
I’ll be jumping on Substack Live this Friday with Sustainable Fashion Forum founder Brittany Sierra to discuss WTF is happening in sustainable fashion right now. WTF? really is the right question. We’re witnessing in real time the erosion of laws meant to curb fashion’s impact, the rapid transformation of the U.S under Trump, an ever growing divide between luxury shoppers and the rest of us, and political tensions you could cut with a knife. Join us as we attempt to unpack it all!
📅 Friday, March 7th | 6PM GMT / 10AM PST / 1PM EST
📍 Where: Substack Live — join via the app or desktop. Enable notifications, and you'll get an alert when SFF goes live.
Things I Did Write
Can Happier Sheep Make Better Wool? for Vogue Business
A growing community of Australian regenerative producers are reimagining wool farming, focusing on small-scale production and emphasising ecological and animal welfare. But many challenges remain.
Fashion Futurists Are Betting On Lab-Grown Materials, But Should We Buy the Hype? for Good On You
Cotton without fields, fur and leather without slaughter—yes, there’s a lot of hype around lab-grown fashion, which aims to bypass the environmental impacts of the mimicked “real things”. Propped up by recent investments, startups are under pressure to scale, bring down the costs, and prove the sustainability metrics of these largely untested materials that the industry could soon rely on to meet its ESG goals.
Things I Didn’t Write
New Report Sheds Light On Global Involvement In Outfitting Israel’s Military by Sophie Benson for Atmos
How East London Is Empowering Refugees Through Fashion by Amma Aburam for Style and Sustain
How Can We Make People Care About Sustainable Fashion? by Bella Webb for Vogue Business
Fossil Fuel Fashion Has A New Clean Alternative by Ruth MacGilp for Fashion Speaks Louder
Antidote To Fast Fashion: Eight Ways To Spot Durable Garments by Lucianne Tonti for the Guardian
What the U.S. Foreign Aid Backlash Means for Garment Workers Worldwide by Jasmin Malik Chua for Sourcing Journal
Decathlon: Revelations On A Champion Of Exploitation by Pierre Leibovici for The Conversation
The To-Do List
