Even if you don’t know about it, many small clothing lines are, by necessity, scavengers or recyclers. The little guys often end up buying big companies’ leftovers. Case in point: These buttons, soon to appear in the FW10 collection, are part of an unused lot once made for Eddie Bauer. We spent about two hours trying to figure out the button situation before these showed up. Decision made.

I periodically visit a multi-disciplinary holistic health practitioner (the amazing Katinka Locascio; New Yorkers, she will change your life, write in for contact info) who also grows and blends herbs. During our first session, she told me that my body was “asking for nettles,” and that taking them would help my oft-pain-addled lower back. Well, they did, and now it turns out the stinging herb (fast becoming a foodie favorite, too) can also be used to make clothes: it grows easily without pesticides, and its hollow fibers insulate beautifully.

Nettle fibers with bark...

...and cleaned up.

Wild nettles have actually been used for textiles since the dawn of recorded history, though they fell out of favor when industrial cotton production took off. (Although it’s been popular for tablecloths, and the German army in WWI used it for their uniforms during a cotton shortage.) Now that alternative textiles are taking off, it’s finding a new audience, and Bodkin’s Fall 2010 collection is going to include some Himalayan wild nettle-blend fabric! According to one supplier, 80,000 Nepalese are employed in harvesting and spinning nettle textiles. The stuff is richly textured and cool in an urban-Bedouin sort of way.

Nettle-blend fabric swatches

Time to have some of Katinka’s organic Vermont-grown nettle-gotu kola-goldenseal-echinacea “Katinkture” tea, also known as the Bodkin flu shot.

We’re getting ready to start shipping the fall collection to stores in a few days, and that means working on the hang tags that accompany each garment. Because you can only fit so much on one tag, the provenance of the fabrics themselves to the blog.

Did you know that even ‘domestic’ fabrics are likely to use raw materials from elsewhere? The Canadian t-shirt jersey uses organic cotton from Turkey, while  the sheep shorn for organic wool seem mostly to live in China.

I didn’t know this at first. Now that I do, I have major carbon guilt. Alas, I’m not going to stop making clothes, and organic is better than not, and it’s a global economy (we’ve gone over this before), but it’s something to think about, anyway.

As soon as I can figure out why images aren’t loading, we’ll go through the stories behind the styles, one by one!

I went fabric-hunting today and fell in love with the most beautiful Japanese knit. Style-wise, it was very Bodkin. It has a traffic-stoppingly exaggerated texture, it’s cuddly and looks really cool, and it’s reversible. The catch? It’s 8 percent recycled cotton and…92 percent conventional cotton.

I never look at most “regular” fabrics for this reason. Organic, recycled, and otherwise environmentally preferable fabrics make up a fraction of the offerings, but then again, that makes deciding a lot easier.

I’ve let this one go, but I wonder what readers think. Would you roll your eyes at a shirt that bothers to announce its 8 percent recycled content? What if it was coming from a ’sustainable’ line? Does that even matter as much as the design when it comes to whether or not you’d actually buy it?

And while we’re on the subject, would you feel better about organic cotton grown in Turkey and woven in Japan before being shipped to New York, or conventional cotton grown and woven (and leaving traces of pesticides) in the Southern U.S.?

Producing clothing in a factory each season is a nuisance under the best of circumstances. When that clothing is meant to be sustainable, that nuisance becomes a nightmare, at least for the greenhorn designer. Now I’ve belatedly learned that I need to get fabric care labels, which are required by FTC law. In my head, I’d thought people would just be able to figure it out; I never even look at care labels except when I’m cutting them off to stop the itching. Now that we’re shipping hundreds of pieces, including some made with hand-dyed silk, that’s not going to cut it.

PERC, the chemical traditionally used by dry cleaners, is a known carcinogen that will be banned from residential buildings—and all of California—by 2020. Even cleaners that claim to be “organic” aren’t necessarily great: Hydrocarbon solvent is petroleum-based, and doubts have been raised as to the safety of silicone solvents. Wet cleaning and liquid CO2 cleaning are the best options, but even I’ve had trouble finding them, and I live in New York City. The final verdict: I’m going to custom-print care labels that encourage the use of PERC-free dry cleaning. It costs more, and it’s probably too late to find a specialty printer who uses nontoxic ink, but such is the learning curve. (Can these labels be printed on organic fabric? We’ll find out in the morning. Would you be willing to pay a few dollars more knowing your garment’s care label was organic? Weigh in below.)

I’m not a fan of dry-cleaning anyway; I usually end up forgetting to pick it up. I prefer washing or spot-cleaning things in the sink if I have to. But then I like when things are wrinkled and imperfect.

In the search for interesting sustainable fabrics that look and feel good, I often come across blends that offer one technological and environmental marvel adulterated with something altogether less appealing. Take the seaweed-blend shirting shown here on Lykke. Seaweed is micronized and combined with a substrate of lyocell (wood pulp cellulose, which is produced very cleanly) to form fiber. It doesn’t retain heat, so it’s cool against the skin in the summer. Its manufacturers also claim that the marine minerals and other nutrients absorb into the skin, protecting it from free radicals and “creating a sense of well-being.” The catch? In this fabric, the fiber comes blended with 75 percent conventional cotton, which, for those of you who haven’t heard, is more or less poisoning us all.

I decided to make the dress, if only to raise awareness of a new, interesting natural textile technology. Algae is a promising substance in all sorts of fields, like fuel (jets have flown on algal oil blends to much recent fanfare) and on-site CO2 absorption at power plants. Although, as it turns out, only the organic cotton gauze version of the dress is going into production (look for it at Steven Alan this spring).

Still, and I hope I’m not going to get in trouble for saying this, I wonder about the “well-being” angle. It’s all well and good if a fabric feels nice and comes from an abundant self-generating source, but I’m curious about the actual structure of the fiber. If it turns out the seaweed is only there to dose the fabric with vitamins, does that violate the principle of sustainability?

What do you think?

Not that this blog exists for boasting purposes, but it must be noted that Bodkin is the first recipient of the Ecco Domani Sustainable Design Award, part of the Ecco Domani Fashion Foundation’s annual award program. This grant is not just making the upcoming fall presentation possible; it’s making Bodkin’s continued existence possible. I share the accolade with my former partner Samantha Pleet (whose fearless attitude got Bodkin off the ground). She is now focusing on her namesake line, but we still share a studio, and things like markers and hole punches.

I commend Ecco Domani for having the balls to start this category. (Am I allowed to use the word “balls” when talking about them?) Sure, the “green is the new black” zeitgeist is old news, but this is an award that’s gone to Rodarte and Alex Wang and it’s still, at this point, a bit provocative to expect directional designers to step up to the plate. Judging by the number of emails I’ve gotten since the announcement, the world is ready for it.

I know quite a few well-regarded fashion designers through my previous line of work, and every one of them is interested in working more sustainably. They may not declare it publicly, but some of the hippest lines in New York are trying out things like recycled polyester and cotton linter (waste cellulose) next season.

Behind every garment is a story—not just that of who made it, but where its fibers were grown, how they became the color they are, where its zippers and buttons came from, how it got to you, and what it all means about us and the way we live.

Because of my writing background—along with my tendency, a la Julianne Moore in Safe, to be acutely aware, down to the molecular level, of modern society’s ambient threats to respiratory and reproductive health—I have decided to document the minutiae of the Bodkin project, and along the way I’ll try and make sense of some thoughts I’ve been having for a while about the science of consumption, and the culture of style.

I started Bodkin (with the help of my talented former partner, Samantha Pleet) not because I felt there weren’t enough amazing clothes out there—there are—but because too few of them are made with regard to anything other than how they look. Is it possible to achieve a certain aesthetic while adhering to a rigorous standard of sustainability in materials? What about the rest of what sustainability means—fair labor, local versus global, and the question of utility in an industry that trades on desire? These are questions I’ll look at in this space.

Right now, I’m in the throes of preparing for my first presentation during New York Fashion Week on February 16th. But a writer must write, and I’ll be posting regularly until then and more regularly afterward about who’s behind the clothes, the materials, how I make decisions in regard to sustainability, the environmental and socioeconomic intricacies of clothing and textiles and the way we live and dress and consume. And, because grey areas are inevitable as any business tries to be sustainable, I’ll expose and discuss them.

Along the way, I encourage you—whoever you are—to speak up in the Comments section.

[Naomi in I’m a Plastic Dress, available in March at Jumelle and Kaight. Photo by Andrew DeFrancesco.]