The historic southern French area of Occitania is encountering a hemp textile renaissance, and not with just any fabric, but with the tough, very long-fiber denim fabric utilized in denims.
Beside the fame of its historic wine location Languedoc, the region was the moment properly identified for comprehensive industrial hemp cultivation that provided countryside weaving workshops.
Occitania’s local weather is dominated by its proximity to the Mediterranean Sea, ensuing in delicate winters, scorching, dry summers and heat autumns. It is the sunniest location of France, with extra than 300 times of sunshine, but also gets enough summer season rain to support hemp cultivation.
The mountainous landscape is intersected by fertile river valleys and rocky clay soils that are abundant in limestone and very well-suited for hemp fiber production.
The Birthplace of Denim
The ancient Roman city of Nimes—situated in the heart of Occitania—is famed for its legendary fabric Serge de Nimes. Serge, which is no for a longer period developed in France, was a durable twill weave cloth woven with hemp and dyed indigo. The materials was employed to make denims and was afterwards supplied the title “denim,” which is a time period generally employed to explain jeans’ cloth now.
France has a lengthy working experience with business production of hemp fabric. During the 19th century, France exported the materials throughout Europe and to America.
Not only do denim fabrics originate from France, but so does canvas—derived from the word “cannabis”—a tabby hemp fabric that is a tightly woven, lengthy-putting on and utilized for bedding, towels, sacks, tarpaulins, and other residence and professional textiles.
In the town of Castres to the west is the previously spouse and children-owned weaving mill Tissages d’Autan, courting back again to the 1930s, and the company’s up to date motto is “Jeans will mature on the fields again.”
The factory companions with VirgoCoop, a business management guide business in Cahors, France, which has the main target of accelerating the emergence of environmentally pleasant and socially accountable projects, and its workforce is dedicated to advertising area and natural and organic textile generation.
© Courtesy of Git Skoglund
“VirgoCoop try[s] to mature and spin French hemp into textiles with the same wonderful high quality as in the previous,” clarifies Mathieu Ebbesen, co-founder and director of the Tissages d’ Autan mill and president of VirgoCoop, adding that the initially ways are renewal of organic and natural textile hemp creation and other reasonable-trade sectors in Occitania and beyond.
Ebbesen works to coordinate the efforts of hemp growers, spinners and weavers, when pursuing his dedication to social equity and economic enhancement within just the community. He speaks knowledgeably about historical textile production, describing that this area of Occitania grew to become renowned for its high-quality wool generation, incorporating that this is also a thing he would like to put into practice into the company’s branding approach.
“When the cooperative started out the weaving mill, we were being decided that we would only generate hemp cloth from 100{05995459f63506108ab777298873a64e11d6b9d8e449f5580a59254103ec4a63} hemp fibers. Nowadays, I have altered my brain set,” Ebbesen suggests.
The mill generates new patterns of exceptional materials working with blends of wool and hemp. On the just one hand, fashionable wool manufacturing poses environmental problems, as uncooked wool from France is shipped to China to be processed and then sent back again as yarns to France. This unsustainable creation product is some thing he intends to modify by regionally spinning and creating wool. On the other hand, there are lots of issues with the processing and spinning of prolonged-fiber hemp, which must first be surmounted right before larger material volumes can be created of pure hemp.
© Courtesy of Robert C. Clarke
“Even so, in the course of 2018, we managed to produce significant portions of pure hemp yarn with our possess French cultivar ‘Futura 75,’ but [unfortunately it’s] not more than enough nevertheless to make denims. As an alternative, the weaving mill created denim with imported Romanian hemp yarn. It’s a move we determined to just take in purchase to inspire the market and justify investments in Occitania,” Ebbesen says. “This denim fabric [was sent] to a trend firm, who marketed almost 1,000 pairs of hemp jeans. That was a huge phase in making our textile sector swim upstream.”
Futura 75 is a European Union-authorized monecious “industrial hemp” wide range with a THC written content beneath .3{05995459f63506108ab777298873a64e11d6b9d8e449f5580a59254103ec4a63}. This cultivar performs nicely all through the shorter, winter time in northern Europe as properly as all through the extensive, summer season time in southern Europe. Futura 75 grows promptly, and when sown in the spring, reaches up to 4 meters tall by August making substantial fiber yields, or if left to mature, its seeds can be harvested in the autumn.
© Courtesy of Git Skoglund
He thinks that troubles with making ready and spinning extensive hemp fibers will be surmounted within 10 yrs, and the mill will have significantly bigger volumes of higher-quality hemp fiber to work with.
“Today France is the biggest European producer of hemp seeds, and we will try to breed a wide variety which is fit for the textile market,” Ebbesen describes.
Processing hemp into robust denim fabrics with existing processing traces is a obstacle. Consequently, Ebbesen suggests Virgocoop plans to breed a French monecious hemp wide range that will be much more uniform at harvest and which, in switch, will crank out additional homogenous fibers required by fashionable spinning lines. The enterprise also ideas to upgrade its latest spinning equipment to far better deal with extended fiber.
“We know that our farmers appreciate the price of increasing hemp in rotation prior to wheat and other field crops, and not primarily for a further goal than this, but they must continue to remove the stalks from their fields. Therefore, we contract them and keep the stalks they harvest and dry,” he states, pointing out that several farmers in Occitania get €300-350 (or $305-356 USD) per every ton of bulk hemp stalks (5.-6. tons/hectare or 2.2-2.7 tons/acre), and that there are both equally organic and natural and traditional growers in the location. He keeps the doors open for all hemp growers but later strategies to change to just natural and organic creation.
