Mineral T Shirt

Blue pigments are incredibly rare in nature – which meant that blue was one of the hardest colours for early civilisations to make. The one we’ve used to dye the Mineral T Shirt is called sodalite and 5,000 years ago the ancient Caral civilisation was using it as currency in the high Andean plateau.

Sodalite is a tectosilicate mineral that’s normally translucent blue in colour. It’s sometimes found in pure crystal form and at its highest quality can be used in jewellery, sculptures and as an architectural stone. Having been formed by crystallising magmas rich in sodium, its name literally means ‘sodium stone’. Deposits of sodalite are found in the veins of plutonic igneous rocks, and have even been discovered in lava on the foothills of Italy’s Mount Vesuvius. Ours also comes from Italy, in an area that stretches from Venice to Verona.

Sodalite is a close relative of other blue minerals like lazurite and lapis lazuli, a prized material that was imported to Europe during the Middle Ages. Lapis lazuli used to be ground down into a pigment called ultramarine, that was once even more valuable than gold. We carry out a similar process with sodalite, grinding it down to a fine powder to create pigment for dyeing.

The sodalite is collected, refined, refracted, and turned into a clean powder. We enhance the blue colour with a tiny amount of synthetic pigment. Then to make the t shirt we add the mineral powder to a vat of water and submerge the whole garment – a process called garment dyeing. There are only two byproducts of this process. Sediment, and water. Both of which can go straight back into nature. The synthetic pigment only remains in trace amounts and produces no negative impacts.

Most clothes today are piece-dyed, which means the fabric is dyed before it’s cut up and sewn together. Garment dyeing requires more time and more care, but it creates softer fabrics with softer colours. And it means that rather than harsh chemicals, we only need to use heat, time and pressure for the colour of the sodalite to stick to the t shirt.

Nearly all the colour you see in clothing today will have been created with petroleum-based dyes. But colour in clothing existed long before the chemical dyeing industry was invented. So we’ve gone back to the colour palette of early man. Because each t shirt is made using minerals made by nature, you might find small differences in colour across it. And because it’s garment dyed, every t shirt has a pre-worn look.

To add to the softness of the t shirt, we don’t just garment dye it in minerals, it’s also made with a blend of 53% hemp, 44% organic cotton, and 3% elastane for stretch, giving it a soft feel and a nice weight.

We tend to think of the colour on our clothes as one thing. Something uniform, bold, and often bright. But this is created using highly synthetic processes. And the colours that nature produces aren’t like that. There are no crazy colours on cave walls because they simply didn’t exist. Dyeing clothing in minerals, rocks and soils is designed to help us rethink how colour can be made.