Wool is not only beautiful but environmentally friendly, yet plastic fabrics misleadingly marketed as “green” have saturated the market, says Guy Hills

Transforming loose fibres into yarn or thread, the spinning wheel is, these days, an object more often encountered in myths, legends and fairy tales than in real life. The wheel, powered by simple human movement, has an almost magical ability to change hazy, fluffy fibre into a strong usable yarn suitable for making clothes by weaving or knitting. Such was the importance of spinning that young ladies were taught the skill from an early age, although most were keen to move on for fear of remaining a spinster for life.

Traditionally seven spinners were needed to keep up with one weaver, so you can imagine the technological leap delivered by James Hargreaves in 1764 when his Spinning Jenny could simultaneously spin eight cones of yarn powered by just one of his daughters – presumably called Jenny. Now that we are on the brink of another revolution, potentially more transformative than our last industrial one, many of us are taking solace in leading a more analogue life.

During lockdown, as well as spinning more vinyl, I followed Gandhi’s advice and took to spinning wool. The Mahatma would spin for at least an hour every morning, a ritual that brought him inner peace because of its focus on patience and mindfulness. For Gandhi, his portable spinning wheel, or charkha, also symbolised a way that India could break free from Britain’s colonial hold. The British had systematically dismantled India’s prosperous textiles industry, and Gandhi argued that by spinning and weaving their own cloth, Indians could reclaim economic self-reliance and stop this “economic drain”.

The Scottish town of Paisley is a case in point. There, clever industrial machines were used to feverishly copy the intricate buta patterns that originated in India and Persia. So successful were the patterned shawls they made from these ancient designs, with their teardrop-shaped motifs, that in the West the style took on the weaving town’s name and is known to this day as paisley.

As a young boy, with a head full of adventure stories, I took to carrying a survival kit everywhere I went. It was an old Gold Block tobacco tin filled with everything I needed, should my 74 school bus suddenly become shipwrecked. Fish hooks, thread, matches, the Morse code scratched to the lid, potassium permanganate crystals (vital for water purification, fire starting and marking wide areas of snow), half nibbled dextrose tablets and a trusty crochet hook – my grandmother having taught me to crochet hats. Carrying tools for survival gave me comfort as I read Raymond Briggs’ apocalyptic When the Wind Blows and listened to Frankie Goes to Hollywood singing “Two Tribes”. I’d catch Armageddon off guard.

Fast-forward 40 years to the Covid epidemic. The localised siren soundings and pan bashings of lockdown felt excitingly more real than the four-minute warnings used on various film and TV dramas of the Eighties. To my delight, I could once again start equipping myself for an impending apocalypse. Over the intervening years my crochet hooks had been put to good use making pixie hats for my family’s three additional heads. My career had also segued from photographer to director of weave design company Dashing Tweeds. My worry now was where I could obtain wool yarn from should plague sweep the country.

Luckily, lockdown afforded me the time to learn to spin, and Mike from our local farmers’ market provided me with fleeces. Wool production in Britain today is in a sorry state as most sheep are bred for their delicious chops; the wool comes as a bonus. But not a free one. For the welfare of sheep, it is the law to shear them during summer months, but the cost of this often outweighs the price obtained for their marvellous wool. Mike was only too happy to give a fleece to a faithful customer and, with my portable Ashford Kiwi wheel, I happily set about the biblical task of fashioning wool to wear.

Clothing is a mystery to many of us: it just appears in shops. Gone are the days when men would ponder over the benefits of woollen-spun versus worsted-spun cloth at our tailor’s before bespeaking a suit that would become a faithful friend for years.

For men in particular, the detachment from cloth and the diminished ability to make clothing choices are the result of the past 70 years of menswear fashion brands slowly chipping away at our egos. Like worn-down disciples of a cult, most men have lost their sense of fashion identity and can now only be formed in the likeness of their nefarious leaders. All the while, sustainable, environmentally friendly and comforting wool is being replaced with profit-making polluting plastic.

We are, you might say, having the wool pulled over our eyes by heinous greenwashing brands – companies that misleadingly market themselves as environmentally friendly. They use terms such as “synthetic lambswool”, and claim to oppose the pollution of the oceans by plastic, all the while creating more cheap plastic-based clothing which is bought by their mind-dumbed cultist followers.

As Gandhi said, we should “Live simply so that others may simply live.”

This article is from Idler #107. 

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