Denim, and its use in jeans, makes it one of the most popular clothing items around the world. And according to statista.com, the global jeans fabric market is estimated to produce more than 4.5 billion meters this year (2023) which is a mind-blowing amount of fabric. Especially when you learn from our Inspirational Woman Janelle Hanna the Founder of White Weft, all the processes the material goes through from farm to factory before it reaches your skin. You will see from Janelle’s story how important her work is, to slow down this over production and to make the most of what already exists for as long as possible and the importance of ‘upcycling before recycling.’ You will also learn how she is using her extensive knowledge of the industry to bring about change.
D: With all my interviews, Janelle, I like to look the paths people have taken to get to where they are now. I am really interested in the things that have influenced you in your journey, making you the person that you are today. With that in mind, I like to start with. Where were you born, Janelle?
J: I was born in Derry, Northern Ireland and lived there until I left for university at 18.
D: Did you have any early influences as far as fashion was concerned? Was there anyone in your family that influenced the path you have chosen to take?
J: There wasn’t much of a fashion scene in Derry in the 90's. It’s a city but a very small one with not many shops. We had a small Topshop, River Island and Primark (pronounced
Pre-mark over there) and it was even struggle to get your hands on a copy of Vogue.
In my late teens one of my friends gave me a case of clothes from the 1970's that belonged to her uncle’s girlfriend who neither of us had met, but she had the most incredible style, I completely lucked out. So, I was wearing all these original 70’s flares and Chinese dresses in retro fabrics (my friends aunt was Chinese). Maybe that's where my love of vintage clothing comes from, that ability to have something unique. I was always a bit alternative.
D: People used to say that we were 10 years behind everybody else.
J: I’m sure it was at the time. Now with online shopping and Instagram it’s completely different. Derry girls are famous for loving to get dressed up to the nines.
When I decided I was interested in fashion it was probably more from a craft point of view rather than a trend or hype point of view, I was never motivated by that and I and that’s still the case.
I don’t remember any designers in the town. In school the only place they could think of to send me for fashion related work experience was the local denim factory, which thankfully still existed at the time. I am really grateful for that journey now. But when I was at university, it felt like I had missed something by not coming from somewhere with more of a fashion scene and not having more reference points for what was going on. But what I gained by coming from a time when there was still manufacturing has been really valuable for me in my whole professional journey.
D: Is there any manufacturing left in Derry?
J: A couple of factories, but sadly less every year. Fruit Of The Loom was the major one in the town and I did my work experience in Desmond's, which was a denim factory making exclusively for M&S, they closed around 2003.
D: Northern Ireland had a huge textile industry to the point that Belfast was called Linenopolis.
J: That’s right and there’s loads of exciting things happening with Linen again I’m keenly following Mallon linen and Mourne textiles for example who are growing and weaving flax again.
Derry was a shirt making town, that's what we're famous for, at the beginning of the 20th century there were over 30 factories and lots of my family will have worked in them.
D: So right back to your school days and work experience you were influenced by denim. How did you end up going to Desmonds for your work experience?
J: I've always designed stuff. At the age of seven or eight, I would draw line ups of dresses or redesign buildings like my school into a massive house for me and my friends. So, it was clear quite early on where my interest lay. For a while I thought of being a graphic designer, but when I was looking for a Uni, the fashion course looked much more interesting. I had a sewing machine and enjoyed making things and was always quite resourceful in that sense, trying to make something out of nothing and with time I realised that this was my path. After I chose the course, the school were looking for somewhere to send me for work experience and the only place in town was Desmonds denim factory.
D: Did you realise that denim was something you really wanted to work with as a result of that work experience?
J: Yes, apart from my childhood red carpet dress design phase, casual wear was always my thing. Perhaps it might be more to do with my background and the fact that jeans are more democratic than high fashion.
The experience in the factory that was a huge spark for me, because I discovered the alchemy of denim, what goes on behind the scenes in the laundry - which I had no idea about before and most people still don't. I would later discover it’s a very murky and polluting side of the industry and we'll talk about that, but as an outsider and a young designer, it was fascinating. You start with a fabric that’s almost black and as it goes through all these industrial processes. The look of it changes completely into the faded blue jeans that have become an icon of our times.
I loved the creative potential and the sheer geekiness.
D: Then you went off to university to study fashion design.
J: I went to university in Nottingham.
D: Did you work with denim there too?
J: After a while, yes. Initially though I thought I had made a great big mistake when I started studying fashion, because I really wasn’t aware of all the other arts subjects that I could have taken instead. I thought the only options open to me were graphic design or fashion design. Then when I got to Uni there were decorative arts, textiles, ceramics, media, photography, all of these things I'd never even imagined were jobs. Derry is very different now - I think the world is very different.
For a while I wanted to change courses but stuck with it. Then for my final year collection I decided I wanted to make a denim collection, but the tutors tried to put me off. They told me denim can’t be made in a studio environment, because denim is really dark unless you wash it. But I said, ‘Ah-ha, but I have contacts for this’. So, I called my friends at the factory, and they agreed to wash my final collection. Without them it wouldn’t have happened. However the tutors weren't completely off the mark. When denim goes through the laundry the process is quite aggressive, and one of the pieces came back with all the seams frayed and were falling apart, a complete nightmare - the final year of a fashion degree is famously intense, but we managed to salvage it. It was so nice to make that connection with the factory again. Then they closed a few years later unfortunately.
D: So, you couldn’t take them with you into your professional career.
J: No, I couldn’t. They made exclusively for Marks and Spencer’s. But I have no doubt that that very small work experience with them, and my final collection at Uni got me my first job as a denim designer at Marks and Spencer’s.
D: It's amazing how it all links together, isn't it? After Marks & Spencer you worked for Fat Face and Wrangler.
J: I went to Fat Face because I wanted to live near the sea. But I think every denim designer really wants to work for one of the big heritage brands so Wrangler was a dream come true. At Wrangler I was surrounded by people who are experts in denim, so you can really deepen your knowledge. Whereas if you're working in within a multi-product brand then you might be the only denim specialist on a very, very big team. In Wrangler everyone was a denim expert, some of them had been working for 40 years in the business, possibly under managers that had put in 40 years before them, so there was all that inherited know how, it was a really steep learning curve.
D: Did you do a lot of travelling with your job?
J: Yes I did, I was clearing out some expense receipts recently, from pre pandemic times thinking, gosh, that was a different life. We travelled a lot for research, mainly hunting for inspiring vintage jeans and trend spotting in places like Tokyo, LA, Berlin. I feel so lucky to have been so many wonderful places for work, but it’s right that we readdress the amount of travel that we do as an industry. We also visited our factories often and still think that’s very necessary. I've worked with many factories in places like Turkey, Tunisia, Pakistan and Mauritius. Denim is a very hands-on product and we tend to work very closely with our manufacturers.
Since I moved back to the UK, I’ve been designing for much smaller brands who produce closer to home in Portugal, Italy and even in London.
D: Nice that is growing in London again.
J: Yes, slowly it is.
D: I guess the travel allowed you to see the working conditions of the garment workers.
How did that affect your outlook on the industry?
J: I think conditions in the laundry were always the most concerning. We'd see people spraying chemicals or covered in dust from grinding rips into jeans, which is dangerous and can cause lung disease. I've mainly worked for companies that had a strong code of conduct and strict auditing processes. On a surface level it seemed like I was making good choices. Yet the deeper I got into the industry, the more I understood how superficial those certificates can be. Often not extending to the laundry, the mills and certainly not the cotton farms and processing plants where much of the labour involved in the making of a jean happens.
The factory's I visited where jeans were sewn and washed usually looked good. They were bright and well ventilated, organised, with on-site doctors, structured breaktimes etc. The longer I spent in the industry the more I realised that this is just the tip of the iceberg,
(tier 1) and what happens before that (tiers 2,3and 4) were much less regulated. Some of the brands I worked for audited deeper into the value chain than others.
One thing that was great at Wrangler was that they had their own factory. This is really, really rare and I loved working with our Turkish factory, but unfortunately fashion companies don’t find in house facilities profitable. Our Wrangler factory closed a few years ago. It’s sad that brands rarely own their manufacturing now because it shows what they are not prepared to co-invest in them. When a brand owns their own factory they have to share the weight of cancelled orders, of production mishaps, natural disasters, pandemics and investing in more sustainable ways of working. Sadly most are not willing to do this.
D: That really happened with the globalisation of the fashion industry's when everybody started offshoring to the Far East which changed the face of the industry even more.
You stopped working with Wrangler in 2002, you said were already looking at other ways of creating, how did that influence your decision to create differently when you set up White Weft?
J: As I was leaving Wrangler, we were starting to get a bit of a grip on some of the deeper problems within industry. Also there was a growing collective conversation in the denim community around change. This may have been prompted by a film released in 2016 called River Blue about pollution from denim factories and a successful campaign by Greenpeace tackling textile water pollution, called detox to zero. Finally, the conversation was gaining pace. I left Wrangler that year and decided to remain freelance to have more time to research and learn how to make jeans in a better way.
So when I moved to London I worked for smaller brands which meant I could continue that research. I also knew that at that point I didn't want to go back into UK retail, because I knew what it was like to be a designer in those places, and with all the best intentions you just don't get head space to explore anything, because it’s a constant and relentless demand to create new things. I actively decided to take on more purposeful work. I helped found a beautiful slow fashion brand called King and Tuckfield where we manufactured in UK and Europe and built relationships with mills who were more transparent with, for example, their fibre origins.
And I've been honoured to work with Blackhorse Lane Atelier who make the most beautiful jeans in their Walthamstow factory, where they pay London living wage and use fabrics from mills carefully selected for their world class quality and strong.
D: As far as White Weft is concerned, you do not make jeans.
J: No, I don’t make jeans.
D: What made you decide not to?
J: OK, that's a really interesting question that I'm asked often. I'd love to make jeans, I'd love to create a net positive denim brand, but denim is a really expensive product to develop. After all the research I did on fibre and sustainability, my challenge to myself was to make a net positive, regenerative jean without greenwashing.
I didn't have the resources to do that. It takes a huge amount of capital to launch a denim brand, to launch all the fits, all the washes, and all the marketing that goes along with selling jeans and the testing which is more than your average clothing product because of the washing aspect.
I still hope to make jeans one day I wanted this project (White Weft) to be something, and I call it a project because it still feels at the experimental stage, that grows authentically and organically so I started with accessories, and I started with waste.
My interest in waste came from a circularity aspect but also from localism and the fibre shed movement. It's a million miles away from the commodity aspect of denim. We don't grow any cotton in the UK, we don't even have spinning and we don't have the infrastructure to convert it to yarn even if we did grow a crop like hemp or flax.
D: That was a question I was going to ask, because we talked earlier about linen. Could you turn linen into denim?
J: Yes you can. With Community Clothing, Patrick Grant did a piece on this recently as an experiment. Mourne Textiles crowd funded to do this but in terms of making a denim brand today, we’re a long way off. But what we do have here is a lot of waste and I’m talking about garments that are no longer desirable for wearing, they might be ripped on the crotch but still have lots of useable fabric or just the wrong styles or sizes for market demand so I decided to start with upcycling. I still fully intend to make jeans, it’s coming but it's not coming this year as it will cost a lot to develop.
D: What you're saying kind of breaks my heart, that wonderful people like yourself, who want to work in really good ways but don't have that access to be able to do the things that would make the industry better. For now as you said, you're upcycling and you're using textile waste, which is fantastic and as you said, there is so much of it.
J: Going back on what you said about people not being able to be able to realise these ideas. I'm realising how huge the problem is for my project, and why it's still a project, and it’s because of what people are prepared to invest in, even the government.
There are two ways the impact of the fashion industry can be changed, one is industrial and one is cultural. In terms of impact the second is arguably much easier but the first more lucrative. What we’re doing at White Weft with the upcycling and also the repair aspect, because I also run a denim repair business, is creating mindset change. It's stimulating cultural shifts in relationships with clothes. I believe that a growing number of people realise that this is what it's going to take for us to really dramatically change the paradigm that we work within. But Investment is all towards green tech, incremental change and a continuation of some version of business as we know it.
So we need more funds that fit with a more holistic perspective yet fund after fund after fund is looking for something that's “outside existing practise.” Everyone is looking for a game changing tech innovation.
But what if the innovation is patience?
What if the innovation is a change in the speed of consumption and new cycles of clothing use?
I think that's a huge problem because I see lots of businesses like mine and can see that they've been forced to jump from stage one to stage 10 and maybe even to a stage they never even ever wanted to go to because that's the only way they can get an investor, who then forces them to grow into something that wasn't necessarily in their plan. I do think that's really frustrating and we need more collaboration to attract more social investment and support to show the game changing value of craft and reuse from different angles.
D: How do we shift that perspective in business? You are right it is a crucial mind shift that is needed.
J: Its tricky but not impossible. I think collaboration is key, outside of fashions usual boxes of PRs, Fashion Councils, Universities and VC’s.
D: Where do you source your fabric from?
J: A lot of it comes from other denim designers and mills. We use a lot of samples in denim and because of the processes I mentioned earlier, as it has to be experimented with before we get to our final result. I receive samples from everyone in my denim network, freelance designers to High Street and luxury brands.
D: What does the name White Weft mean? Is it a denim term?
J: It is a textile term with denim significance. Every woven fabric has a horizontal and vertical yarn, or “thread”. The vertical thread is the warp and the horizontal thread is the weft. And what makes denim denim, is that the warp is always indigo and the weft is always white and undyed.
D: Fantastic.
J: It started out as quite a geeky denim project. In fact, it was my consultancy name. My business consultancy was called White Weft before it had a product. Now it's gone the other way and I think I will have to separate my consultancy and call it something else. White Weft is now very different and is a project that has its own life now.
D: You mentioned the right thread when weaving denim is indigo, the warp thread, can we or could grow indigo here in this country? If yes would it be viable to grow it organically and use it locally?
J: We can't grow indigo very easily in this country it needs warmth to grow so that wouldn’t be very sustainable industrially. We do have indigenous versions of indigo, woad for example is a blue plant that gives a similar colour, which we can grow here. The indigo used in most jeans, is a synthetic replica of the indigo plant. Very, very, very little natural indigo exists in the denim industry. So, it's misleading, isn't it?
D: So, you're saying very little natural indigo and very little organic cotton, because organic cotton is still not grown to scale either. It's still only around 1% of the whole cotton industry.
J: That’s because it takes so long to become organic and certified there is a real shortage of organic cotton compared to the demand.
For indigo at the moment there are small scale projects and explorations using more natural dyes for denim.
D: Is that mostly in America though?
J: Not today. It's more in the mills in the manufacturing countries. The mills that use a bit of natural indigo, but not enough to make any sort of impact are in China, Japan and Mexico. The amounts are so small that to talk about them is almost a sort of greenwash. But there are lovely things happening in some corners like colour grown cotton and natural coloured hemp. Which is where the indigenous cotton plant has a coloured fibre and then we just use it in its natural state rather than bleaching it, or rejecting and not using that variety of cotton plant.
D: Cotton whenever it's grown its usually white, am I right? Then when it’s milled, does it become a different colour?
J: No, no. What I'm talking about is plants with a cotton ball that grow with a different colour. It's not common but there are a few products around using it at the moment.
D: That's interesting.
J: Other interesting experimentation is happening with dyes for the future. Natural dyes, dyeing methods that come from bio cultures or that come from waste by products. There's also a quite well scaled development by the denim technology company Tonello, where you can industrially dye garments with natural dyes. It’s a system called wake and it creates dye from food waste which is made into a kind of tea. It’s an exciting time.
D: Tell us about White Weft, tell us about your brand.
J: At White Weft we do everything we can to extend the useable life of denim.
It’s all about the pipeline and there are 2 aspects to our practise, repair and upcycling.
First we’ll try to repair garments using our darning machine and the idea is that when they’re finally deemed unworthy of repair they can be upcycled.
D: How important is it for you to offer repair?
J: It's really important because I think the hope and the purpose is to keep denim in use for as long as possible especially because I know all of the resources that have gone into making it. I know how much is being compromised in terms of its environmental footprint, and how much exploitative labour there is in the supply chain. There is no undoing that garments footprint, and we need to give respect to that, the very least which, is that it should be used for as long as possible.
So, the process is Wear, Repair, Upcycle. Then at the end of use the ideal chain would be to send it for recycling because it doesn't matter how worn it is, it can still be mulched down into cellulose and made into fibre again or shredded for insulation. But to get the most value out of it, we should go through all the other processes first.
That’s why we upcycle before recycle.
We make a collection of accessories, bags, caps, hats and even slippers. We want our remade products to feel good as new. Everything is beautifully sewn and finished and bursts peoples’ preconceptions about what upcycled products should look like.
Each piece is individual and unique that’s both our strength and our curse.
What you hear when you start working with waste from everyone in the industry is that it's not scalable and it's not commercial.
D: Why is it not scalable or commercial?
J: I'm not saying that it's not, but the reason that's given is that it's not cost effective because the materials are not uniform. Lots of factories don’t want to know because traditionally in production everything is timed and it's all about efficiency. Normally in a factory, materials are rolls of fabric, which are rolled out on the table 50 lengths at a time and then cut. When you have non-uniform inputs to begin with, somebody has to sort them, then they are all different, so they have to be cut individually and the cost of that is phenomenally higher than making one by one.
That doesn't mean that there aren't ways to solve that problem and that really motivates me. My thinking was ‘if anybody can tackle this I can’, because I’m coming at it with experience of both sides. All my mass market production experience is going to be useful for something.’ So I have stepped in using that all that knowledge and knowing the problem I want to solve. I also really wanted to explore what we could do with stretch denim. 100%. cotton denim is gaining popularity again, but 90% of the denim on the market is stretch denim. It has elastane in it, at least 2% is elastane. A lot of denim stock now has 6 to 8% polyester woven in. Which means they are blended fibres and very difficult to recycle.
D: Are they harder to work with too?
J: They are harder to work with. They move when you sew them and don’t press as nicely. There are a lot of people working on the chemical recycling of those fabrics now like Renewcell and it is gaining in scale. Hopefully in the midterm future we will be will able to recycle a lot more. But in the meantime I thought, ‘what is it that can we be doing with stretch denim right now. It was a real challenge and one that I have really grabbed by the horns. We’ve now got 2 great products using stretch denim, the offcut slippers and the Judo strap tote bag.
D: Are you making all the product yourself?
J: I used to do everything but now I have seamstresses and seamsters working in the studio with me, I still do a lot of the repairs and particularly the visible mending commissions which are a new aspect of the denim design job in my opinion.
D: I wonder what the figures are for people using denim the fast fashion way, where they wear it once and throw it away. It seems less likely that you would do that with a pair of jeans.
J: Well, I do think it is less likely that people intend to do that, but actually the way that jeans are designed, I think that that does happen a lot more than we would like as designers to admit. But the main problem there is, when people buy stretch jeans that give too much on the knees, or on the waist, then they end up not being able to wear them because they're uncomfortable. This even happened to me an in the earlier days, so I can relate to it. The other issue is buying jeans that are pre ripped, I really wish that everyone would stop doing this.
D: I have been guilty of this. And now, I want to mend all the rips.
J: With pre-ripped jeans, putting your foot through them is another classic reason why it's just going to landfill. We also don't mend things enough, as either we can’t do it ourselves or are not prepared to pay the cost of mending. When I visit the waste centres, a lot of the jeans I see there would only have a crotch rip, and I now repair crotch rips for that reason. So there are lots of reasons why they are often not kept as long as you would like to think.
D: You mentioned earlier that you consult with other brands to share your extensive knowledge. What made you decide to do that?
J: Being freelance was a lifestyle choice at first. Now I really enjoy going in, seeing lots of different businesses, seeing a lot of different problems, and being able to bring the solutions because of the depth of my denim knowledge. Often something that is second nature to me can really improve ways of working for a team or reduce their overall impact.
One of the more recent developments is that I’ve been able to use my experience of repairing and upcycling jeans combined with my denim product development knowledge, to train teams in how to design for circularity and I’m absolutely loving that.
D: What drives you, Janelle?
J: I want to see transformation. On one hand I can see another way the industry could look. I believe it will still be fun, still joyful. People are going to have better lives and earn living wages and it drives me to be part of that. On the other hand, when we talk about transformation, I love transforming material. I really love getting the stuff that looks like trash, useless nothing but a burden, and making it into something that can be used and appreciated again.
D: What's next?
J: As I mentioned earlier I’m looking at how we could develop the studio practice within a social enterprise framework, which is quite a biggie and all feedback on that is welcome.
As well as that we’d like to do more wholesale and are on the lookout for the right partners. We’re also growing the repair business and currently work with two brands doing premium repairs and reinventions for their customers, so I’m really excited to see how that develops this year.
Then in terms of the consultancy, more projects on circularity where I can utilise the full breadth of my expertise is what I am aiming for.
Links
Website: White Weft
Instagram: White Weft
LinkedIn: Janelle Hanna
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Your blog has become my virtual mentor, guiding me in various aspects of life.
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