Plant Dyed Sweatshirt

We’ve built a collection of ultrasoft chillout gear dyed entirely with plants. There are five pieces in total – a t shirt, a hoodie, sweatpants, sweatshorts, and this sweatshirt. And each one gets its colour from plant waste that we’ve intercepted on its way to landfill.

Every year, millions of tonnes of almond shells are left to rot or set on fire, just to get rid of them. It doesn’t feel like humanity at its smartest. So we’re taking these leftover shells from the almond production industry, and transforming them into a low-impact, natural pigment for dyeing clothing.

We source our nutshells from a farm in Spain – the world’s second largest almond producer after California. The shells are ground down to create a brown pigment before we take them across the border to RDD, a cutting-edge Portuguese dyehouse. Here we mix the almond pigment with a water-based binder to create liquid dye. We then cut and sew each t shirt, and submerge the whole thing in a giant vat of the dye. 

The process of submerging clothes in dye like this is called garment dyeing. It’s more difficult and takes more time than regular dyeing. And it’s especially difficult when you’re using a completely new kind of dye. But it can help make fabric incredibly soft, and look and feel lived in from day one, with colour building up in the stitching and creases, while coming out paler at the edges.  

For the last 5 years we’ve been experimenting with different ways to make colour that reduce the industry’s reliance on petroleum-based dyes. We’ve worked with everything from the world’s first black algae dye, to wood, turnips and blueberries, minerals like celadonite and hematite, earth pigments like ochre, and even DNA.