The Woman Who Grew a Pair of Jeans
Justine Aldersey-Williams spent a year coaxing indigo and flax from Merseyside soil. She also has something no one else in Britain possesses: a pair of jeans made entirely from plants she grew herself.
Six hundred hours. That's what it took to create the UK's first completely homegrown denim, from seeds sprouting in her Hoylake allotment to the final seam. While most of us struggle to keep houseplants alive, Justine was breaking, scutching, and hackling flax with medieval tools, extracting pigment from woad leaves, and spinning thread by hand every single day for nine months.
The UK's first homegrown, homespun jeans by Justine Aldersey-Williams. Photo credit: Big Cheese Photography
The founder of Northern England Fibreshed didn't set out to make fashion history. She wanted to prove a point about Britain's textile amnesia. We buy 70 million pairs of jeans annually, yet we've forgotten how to make a single pair from our own resources. Justine's experiment with Patrick Grant of Community Clothing began as an attempt to create a commercial line of locally-produced jeans, but it revealed something more troubling: our complete dependence on global supply chains.
The documentary "Woman Grows Jeans" captures this collision between ambition and reality. What cameras recorded wasn't just the romance of heritage craft, but the brutal economics of why we abandoned these skills in the first place. Every frame asks the same uncomfortable question: if it takes 600 hours to make one pair of jeans, what does that say about the true cost of the pairs we buy for £20?
Justine Aldersey-Williams in the Wild Dyery studio. Image Credit: Raw Photography.
But Justine's response to this question isn't despair - it's education. From her Wild Dyery studio, she teaches botanical dyeing to anyone willing to learn that mordants aren't just chemistry - they're a form of place-based knowledge. Her workshops don't preach about sustainability; they simply put madder root and iron water in your hands and let you discover what your grandmother's grandmother knew without thinking.
This hands-on approach also drives the Northern England Fibreshed movement she founded, which operates on radical premises: that textiles should come from recognisable landscapes, that dyes should be seasonal, that making cloth should strengthen rather than extract from local ecosystems. It's not anti-technology; it's pro-memory.
Justine Aldersey-Williams and Patrick Grant in a field of retting flax. Photo credit: Bea Davidson
Those home-grown jeans hand proudly in Justine's wardrobe now, worn and loved like any other pair. The difference is, they're trousers that also happen to contain the compressed labor of growing seasons, the muscle memory of processes older than industrialisation, and the stubborn belief that we don't have to accept the textile status quo.
Film poster for 'Woman Grows Jeans'.
At London Textile Month this September, you can experience both parts of Justine's story. The London premiere of "Woman Grows Jeans" will be followed by a live Q&A with Justine herself at Crouch End Picturehouse. Then, in a guided meditation and intuitive embroidery workshop, you'll stitch with the same British indigo thread that took a year to grow - the UK's only "British Indigo from Organic Woad" that she and her business partner Mark Palmer are now pioneering for commercial production. Participants can bring their own garments to embellish or mend, taking home a piece of this textile history sewn into their own clothing. It's a chance to hold the threads that connect us back to the land, and forward to what we might grow from it.
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Further Information:
Selvedge London Textile Month takes place across the city throughout the whole of September.
Woman Grows Jeans Embroidery Workshop
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Justine Aldersey-Williams - The Wild Dyery
Image Credits:
Lead Image: Justine Aldersey Williams wearing a home-grown jumper and jeans at The Wild Dyery studio. Photo by Raw Photography.
All other images as credited in photo captions.