Material World: Textiles Take Root at Kew
This autumn, inside the soaring Temperate House at Kew Gardens, something looks different. As sunlight filters through iron and glass onto flora and fauna, other unexpected forms appear to be sprouting from the soil itself: puffer jackets padded with herbs, knitwear spun from nettles, cloth woven from seaweed, and dresses designed to dissolve gently back into the earth. Material World (20 September – 2 November) is Kew’s first festival devoted to fashion and textiles, and it feels less like an exhibition than a living story about how our clothes might once again grow in harmony with nature.
Lottie Delamain, Chelsea Garden. Photo credit: Dave Watts
The story begins with a problem. Every year, up to 100 billion new garments are produced worldwide. Almost 90% are discarded within a short span, filling landfills or feeding incinerators. Fashion, once rooted in the careful tending of fibres and dyes, has become an industry of extraction. Material World asks: what if we rewrote this narrative? What if the future wardrobe was regenerative, not destructive?
Detail of an Eirinn Hayhow healing herb filled puffer jacket, as part of the London College of Fashion participation in Material Worlds.
Visitors encounter designers working at the edge of possibility. Silvia Acién’s knitwear combines pineapple fibres, nettles and Mediterranean grasses, coloured with dyes made from invasive plants and bacterial pigments. Eirinn Hayhow’s “Healing Puffers” are filled with foraged lavender, chamomile and hawthorn, garments that comfort body and mind. Jessie Von Curry and Vega Hertel present trousers woven from Scottish seaweed – a fibre harvested without soil, fertiliser or freshwater. Beth Williams imagines compostable garments that return directly to the earth, textiles that give back rather than take away.
Silvia Acién's natural fibre fashion, as part of the London College of Fashion participation in Material Worlds.
The storyline expands through large-scale commissions. Suspended high in the glasshouse canopy, Nigerian-born artist Nnenna Okore’s Between Earth and Sky stretches like vast, winged forms – biodegradable, luminous, and reminding us of ecological responsibility. Outside, Lottie Delamain’s Global Threads reconnects the garden with the wardrobe: beds of dye and fibre plants bordered by discarded textiles from local charity shops, a garden that grows both beauty and critique.
Creating Threads of the Canopy. Image copyright: RBG Kew
Other chapters trace history and amplify overlooked voices. Threads of the Canopy stitches a map of Kew using natural dyes and hand embroidery, each piece representing a tree that yields pigment or fibre. Michael McMillan’s How Cotton Became King traces the tangled legacy of colonialism and capitalism through a 17-minute audio-visual installation. The League of Artisans’ What the Fibres Remember listens to makers in Colombia, India and Peru, carrying forward generations of sustainable knowledge.
By weaving together plants, fungi, artists and designers, Material World tells a story of fashion at a turning point. It is a reminder that clothes are not separate from the living world but bound to it, and that a more hopeful, regenerative future is already taking shape beneath our feet. With tickets from just £1, Kew opens up an invitation for everyone to walk among the gardens and garments, and reimagine a future of clothing as one rooted not in extraction, but in renewal.
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Further information:
Material World: Temperate House, Kew Gardens, 20 September – 2 November 2025
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Image Credits:
Lead: Nnenna Okore – Between Earth and Sky. Image courtesy of Kew Gardens.
All other images as credited in photo captions.