place based fiber ecosystems as local resilience

What if we re-imagine the role of textiles, textile-based skills, and regenerative, place-based, textile systems? Our local economies, our households, bring forth the materials and relationships we need to build hopeful, resilient futures. Within local bioregions, fiber looms as a particularly rich lens into a creative and tactical imagining of possible futures. Fiber and textiles are a bridge connecting history, economics, and labor to an enduring narrative capacity and a legacy of material and technical innovations.

 Not only is it necessary to re-engage with textiles in their material form, in order to connect to our lived, physical world, the world we live in as embodied beings –– but we also have an opportunity to reveal textiles as a hidden and critical part of the broader historical narrative we inhabit, the infrastructure patterns we’ve created, and the economic philosophies of the post-Industrial Revolution world. They sit at the intersections of urban and rural social, cultural, and economic systems, and as such are a physical manifestation of patterns and systems that entangle us all.

Delivered as part of the Responsible Fashion Series, an international conference highlighting innovation, bio-design, and technology in the fashion industry, held at ASU FIDM in DTLA early Nov 2025.