Episode 130: Regenerative Fashion with Lydia Wendt of California Cloth Foundry

Weave Podcast Transcript Episode 130 

 Sarah Resnick:  I’m Sarah Resnick.  

LaChaun Moore:And I’m LaChaun Moore. 

Sarah Resnick:  And we are the hosts of the Weave Podcast, a project of the weaving yarn shop, GIST Yarn & Fiber.  

LaChaun Moore: Hello. Hi, everyone. I hope all is well. In this week’s episode, I’m speaking with Lydia Wendt, the founder and design director of California Cloth Foundry. Originally from New York, she trained at the Fashion Institute of Technology and worked with some of America’s top fashion designers and brands, including Tom Ford for Perry Ellis America, Calvin Klein, Jones New York, and The North Face. Before founding California Cloth Foundry in 2014, she was a member of the faculty of the Academy of Art University’s internationally recognized fashion department. While there, she taught graduate and undergraduate courses in textile design and sustainable fashion.  Lydia’s past work in the fast fashion industry informs and guides California Cloth Foundry’s mission to positively change the industry one bolt of fabric and garment at a time for the health of the planet and the future of her two daughters.  Hello, Lydia. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for joining us.  

Lydia Wendt: Hi, LaChaun. Thank you for inviting me to your podcast. This is fantastic.  

LaChaun Moore:Can you start out by introducing yourself and also talking about your affiliation to the California Cloth Foundry?  

Lydia Wendt: So, talking about myself, I am a New Yorker, born in New York, and then moved to California about 20 years ago, and I cut my teeth in the fashion industry on Seventh Avenue in New York City, and I began working with some of the greats. Tom Ford when he was at Perry Ellis America, Calvin Klein, Jones New York. I did a stint working with a private label manufacturer and our major clients were Bloomingdales, The Limited Stores, Phillips – Van Heusen, which owns Tommy Hilfiger, and a number of other brands.  So, I’m pretty much deeply rooted in the fashion industry, and then my affiliation to California Cloth Foundry is that after moving out to California and consulting and teaching sustainable fashion and teaching textile design here, I began working with a nonprofit called The Fiber Shed, and they had a project for me with The North Face, and I was tasked with creating the program for them called… Eventually it became The Backyard Project or The Backyard Hoodie Project, and they needed a commercial designer and somebody that was… that had a deep relationship with many of the different supply chain partners that are now part of California Cloth Foundry.  And so, I created a supply chain for them, redesigned the product with The North Face and with The Fiber Shed. This was a nonprofit kind of collaboration with The North Face. And at that time, I grew the program from 200 hoodies to 7,000 hoodies, and we needed to be able to manage the liability through a corporation rather than through a nonprofit. And it was a partnership with The North Face, but The North Face was not managing the liability of this supply chain. So, I founded California Cloth Foundry as a corporation to manage the entire supply chain with the intention of setting up a company that would then grow from that origin, from this all American supply chain, and the goal was not only to supply textiles to greats like The North Face and Levi’s, but it was… The main goal was to create volume, scalable textiles programs, that then I could, or then California Cloth Foundry could sell to smaller brands.  And the power of volume is really important in the supply chain, whether it’s global or whether it’s local, in that when you work with mills, small designers don’t have the power to be able to buy 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 yards worth of fabric, so they don’t have the opportunity to purchase completely regenerative, and sustainable, and clean, and green, and organic textiles. It’s only the large, the giants, the ones that can command the volume to be able to do that. So, the intention of California Cloth Foundry’s textile side was to be similar to a farm box where I get a number of orders from small brands and then go into a cooperative order of let’s say a few thousand yards of either a jersey, or a French terry, or a twill, and then be able to sell, break that order up through my company, and sell textiles to other small fashion brands that were on the path towards regenerative and sustainable collections.  And bringing it to today, we have launched our first Los Angeles, we call it First Edition L.A., and we had a collection in San Francisco, but now we’ve moved all of our manufacturing down to Los Angeles and we have a headquarters up here in San Francisco, where I am right now, and so now we not only sell textiles to a number of fantastic brands. We also have our own collection of apparel brought through the entire supply chain, dyed with natural dyes, and finished with completely green ingredients, so there’s no petroleum in our products.  And our goal is to be 100% regenerative. At the moment, regenerative is about mostly agriculture at the moment, which would be food and fiber, and the dyes are regenerative, meaning whomever we are purchasing these dyes, and these fibers, and these yarns from, it means that when they are growing those fibers, or they’re growing those dyes, they’re working on agriculture and they’re working in systems that they want to improve and leave better than when they began. So, they’re leaving the soil better, so it’s richer soil, to be able to create more and more beautiful dye plants, and cotton, and hemp, and linen, flax, and even regenerative agriculture within wool and silk.  You know, there’s a way to raise your and rotate your herds or within silk so that you’re creating ethical and healthy systems for your animals. And so, that’s what we’re talking about with regenerative, so our textiles are regenerative, and when we assemble them we consider all of the different components and all of the different labor that goes into it. And our intention in regenerative is to be more than sustainable. Not just sustaining status quo, but actually creating products that help to clean up systems and to leave it better than when we began that.  

LaChaun Moore: It’s so amazing to hear you go into depth about the business structure and also what has inspired the way that you do business with California Cloth Foundry. I’m really also very impressed with the system you’ve created being you can say a mediator between having to fulfill these really, really large orders, and then also being able to provide products for smaller designers to then build themselves up to potentially become producers. I’m really curious, what were the early steps or what kind of inspired you as you made your transition from traditional fashion into sustainable fashion? Did it start with North Face?  

Lydia Wendt: No, it didn’t, but thank you, LaChaun, for saying that, because this has been… You know, I don’t want to date myself, but it’s been 30 years of educating myself, making mistakes, creating relationships within the industry, business to business, and listening to the customer, and teaching, as well. So, when I began in New York, I was just very excited to be able to create 20,000 skirts for Bloomingdales, right? In three different colors, in five different sizes. And really negotiate with the mills and negotiate with the manufacturers to bring the price down and to be able to please my customer, which I worked with a very large team when I was there.  But I was touching every part of that product development and we were always much more concerned about price points for our big corporate customers. Well, doesn’t matter whether it’s corporate or not, but for our customers. We were concerned about the price points and eventually it was in the ‘90s, and eventually that was the beginning of true fast fashion, and we were part of that fast fashion movement. And what I was realizing is that when I would go to the mills and I was asking them to swap out a fiber, or a color, or dumb down a design, they were really working hard to develop products that were less expensive. And what that did, all the way down the supply chain, we were taking pennies out of the supply chain to create a better profit and a lower price, and that actually all the way down the supply chain was taking pennies out of the farmers’ and the mill workers’ pockets. And once I realized that, as well as going to the mills and working within the system, visiting the dye houses, I was realizing that not only was it… not toxic, but I would say it was not really an ethical system that really supported… it didn’t support clean agriculture, because the farmers were trying to produce as much as possible, because the price was too low.  They really wanted the orders, so they would lower their price so that they could get huge orders that would go eventually into let’s say a Bloomingdales or a Limited store. And so, it was during that time of early fast fashion that I realized that it was a non-sustainable system. And then eventually moving to California and just consulting and teaching, what I did was I took that unsustainable, all those components that were not sustainable, whether it was the ingredients that were toxic, or the labor practices that were toxic, and started to work on swapping out higher prices, better labor practices, and cleaner ingredients. So, it was step by step. And you know, sustainability is a slow process, and the first step was swapping out conventional cotton with organic cotton. And also considering what finishes and dyes were being used and requested.  The more expensive finishes and dyes that were low toxins, like GOT certified, Global Organic Textile certifications. So, it was a slow process, and it was mostly from experiencing the negatives before learning how to replace them with the positives. I think that answers your question. We can go into more detail for every single step, but it really was learning from the mistakes and learning from the system that was creating more… Fast fashion was toxic. In every way.  

LaChaun Moore: Yeah. I mean, one of the best ways to learn is to make mistakes. And so, I absolutely understand what you’re saying with how you had to kind of see how toxic fast fashion was going to become, and how that inspired you to create such a sustainable system. I’m really curious as I’ve begun to see now a lot more organic cotton available in stores and even through GIST Yarn, we use… One of our in-house yarns is half conventional, half organic, and we’ve been learning more and more about how to continue to create organic yarns, and also we’ve also had to deal with pricing and such. And we noticed that the price of organic cotton has risen, which I know is a great thing for organic farmers, and I’m just kind of curious if you’ve noticed that. Like if you’ve noticed a change within the last maybe 5 to 10 years of sustainability?  

Lydia Wendt: Yes and thank you for saying that with the sensitivity of price points. It’s really difficult. So, the transition to a more sustainable system is the step towards regeneration, right? It is, and the prices going up, that is a byproduct. And that byproduct is something very difficult for the consumer to accept, but they’re accepting it more and more, and that’s why there’s more organic cotton out there, and that’s why the demand is rising. And that’s also why the price is rising, because finally labor is being paid better. And they should be.  A farmer needs to be able to sell their product at the right price for them to make a profit and for them also to eliminate some of the chemicals and GMOs that aided in fast growth and really dense yields, very high yields. So, when you’re using all this chemistry, yes, you can get faster and higher yields, faster growing products with higher yields, meaning much more of it, and that’s the only way that they can keep the price down. Once you create a more sustainable system, your yields go down a little bit. You’re buying more expensive green chemistry, right? And you’re buying more expensive seed, and you’re paying your labor properly, so that they abide by the rules instead of cutting corners.  And when they cut the corners, that’s when we have highly toxic chemicals being used, which then deeply affects our environment, as well as making the people who are working within that system sick. So, I think the higher prices, you know, in a best case scenario I wouldn’t go dark here. I would say the higher prices directly represent the healing of the system. And the higher the prices of the yarn, obviously all these mills, they have more… all of their expenses are going up, as well. So, they need to support their workers, their machines, and their systems, so that they don’t have to cut corners, as well.  And I do believe that when you cut corners to lower the price, so that you can get the order, they’ll do anything. They’ll swap out… You know, as a manufacturer, they’ll swap out the more expensive. They won’t buy the more expensive ingredients. They’ll buy the cheapest ingredients that they can find, which are often the most toxic. So, I think it’s a good… The higher prices are good. It’s just reeducating the consumer and creating the demand and helping the consumer to understand the benefit of it, so that they can make really thoughtful choices and maybe they’ll buy less, but they’ll buy better.  

LaChaun Moore: And kind of going back to something that you were talking about before about fast fashion and the start of it, I’ve never had the opportunity to speak with someone who sort of saw its rise, and I’m always really curious. What was the change in the industry that made fast fashion happen? Or was there a change or was it just something that had to happen at some point, like the system just got to a point where this was what it was? I’m really curious if it has something to do with just large corporations, if it has something to do with a surplus of manufacturing, exporting, labor, like where did fast fashion come from?  Lydia Wendt: Yeah. It’s a good question and it is really interesting. The movement of it or the… You know, you can see the rise of it in the ‘90s and all that I really can say to that is what you just said. The manufacturing wants to grow, right? You get excited when you can create more, and large, beautiful stores, like the Bloomingdales, any sort. Not even beautiful. You see… You saw large stores start to emerge. Now, I’m not saying the Target and the Walmarts only, but you know, I would say Target and Walmart are two of the big contributors to that. And of course, the other fast fashion brands that we could list, but there’s really no reason to because everybody knows them.  I think that they started to emerge because they found that they could negotiate better prices, with higher volume, and they could create through marketing, they could create the demand that they wanted through culture. New is better and you can’t wear the same thing twice within the same group of people. You know, it’s a cultural shift, as well.  So, I think it’s a lot of what you just said. It’s the manufacturing. Manufacturing wants to grow. Corporations want to grow. Look at Amazon. Amazon wants to grow. Whole Foods. All of these companies that seemed quite normal and sustainable before started to grow like crazy so that they could… You know, they’d had more investors, right? They’d have more shareholders, and the shareholders were excited because they were getting a great return on investment and dividends. And so, it’s growth without consideration of… I’m sorry. It’s growth and lowering prices. And as I said, if you get an order for a thousand skirts from JC Penney, you know, we actually… When that was one of our private label customers, JC Penney’s, and we were manufacturing in New York, and we were manufacturing in the Caribbean, and we got an order for 20,000 one color skirt. It was very sheer. And that skirt was like a layering piece.  And it was so inexpensive to create offshore that we just kept on supplying it at a very, very low price. And then by mistake, one of our factories, I think it was in China, sewed it inside out because you could see both sides. You couldn’t really tell which side of the fabric was the right side of the fabric. Well, then they returned 20,000 skirts to us and we couldn’t do anything with it, and we had to throw them away. Right? So, that’s the beginning of fast fashion. You have to… You’re moving fast. You’re getting more and more orders. You have to go offshore unless there’s a huge manufacturing facility and you know, in the Carolinas, or in California, that can manage 20,000 units tomorrow. So, the demand, the lead times were getting shorter, the fashion trend was turning really fast, the deliveries, they always wanted new.  So, that Zara, right? Once a week you’d get a new product. Or H&M. So, I think it’s cultural and it’s corporations, and it’s exciting for companies to grow so fast, and when that happens, investors want to invest more, so that feeds a system that is if not watched and checked, can be destructive instead of productive. Yeah, so in the ‘90s, I think that that’s when these big box stores started to grow, and now we see the results. I don’t know why it wasn’t before, but maybe culturally it wasn’t as… It was more acceptable to be able to wear the same clothing a few more times. I think it’s a bit of marketing, too. And prices. Sensitivity to pricing.  

LaChaun Moore: Yeah. I always think about this. I think from an aesthetic design perspective, I think clothing has gotten a lot more simple. Less lines, pockets that don’t open fully, or collars that don’t fully function. Clothes have become a lot different over time. The fast fashion version of things that were maybe made in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and even when I look at vintage, like when I go to vintage stores, and I worked at a vintage store, I would always just love looking at the clothes and just be amazed at the quality of just the fabric alone.  And also, you can still see the hand of the person that made the clothes, whereas I feel like in fast fashion, you really don’t see much of the hand. Even though it absolutely exists, because all clothes are handmade, but you can just see a really, really, really big difference in the way that the clothes are made and produced, and yeah, I think that there’s so, so, so many things that contribute to the progression away from it, and it is nice to see that people are going back to having a desire for well-made clothes and are understanding the value of having things that last. Real pieces.  

Lydia Wendt: Right. Right. And that was… You know, and I’ll take that real pieces and clothing that lasts into our first collection that we created for California Cloth Foundry. And our intention is… It’s not a tailored suit. So, tailored suits, you have this mentality that you can spend more money and it will last a lot longer and you can have it repaired. This is what we hope. More bespoke, but we hope to… But everything in our collection right now, it’s made in a way, the textiles are made to last, the designs are made to last a number of seasons and build into your wardrobe. So, your wardrobe should build upon itself and it should feel real. As you said, those seams. You should be able to see that those seams aren’t going to fall apart in two wearings or one washing.  And so, our intention is just that. I don’t know if you call that slow fashion, but it’s really just putting a lot of attention into number one, the design. Number two, the ingredients, which of course is our true focus here, that all the ingredients should be good for you and be good for the supply chain and be good for the environment. And then you want to have them around for a long time, right? You want to have it in your closet. You want to have it just within your wardrobe. And I think that’s going back as you said to the vintage clothing that you’re looking at. The fabric felt better. The seams looked better. The pockets worked. And that’s what we want, because then you’re gonna… You’re going to want to repair it instead of throw it away. And that’s the idea of shifting away from that fast fashion and shifting into more healthy, clean ingredients.  Because if you’re investing in healthy, clean ingredients, like the food you eat, in your wardrobe, like the fibers you’re putting on your body and the colors that you’re wearing, you’re gonna become attached to it and you’re going to invest more money in it. So, it better be made well, right? Because it’s gonna be more expensive.  

LaChaun Moore: Absolutely. And you know, it also makes me think a lot about luxury fashion, or “luxury” in quotation, because that is where you tend to see higher quality fabrics, and pockets that work, and you know, extra design lines, and things of that nature. But also, then the price is inflated. It is interesting when you look at sustainable fashion, kind of exist within this very interesting space where we are much less expensive than luxury fashion items, but the quality is comparable. But we are making clothes that we are aiming to be accessible for people that are not in a luxury fashion buying market, I guess you could say.  

Lydia Wendt: And bracket, right? Income bracket. Yeah.  

LaChaun Moore: Right. Exactly. Income bracket. Yeah.  

Lydia Wendt:Yes. Add a little bit to that luxury conversation, I wanted to say that when I was in fashion school, I was at FIT in New York, I actually was… I put myself through school as a fashion model. And I was very fortunate to be able to wear Giorgio Armani. I did a runway show for their Emporio line. Issey Miyake.  

LaChaun Moore: Oh, I love Issey Miyake.  

Lydia Wendt:Yeah. I was the… I guess the muse or the model for… I’m not gonna say the year, but one whole… His secondary line, it’s kind of like the Emporio of Issey Miyake was IS, and it was their casual kind of cool street everyday wear. And so, I was very fortunate to be able to wear some of the most luxurious, and wearable, clothing. It wasn’t the couture. It was their secondary lines, always clothing, and so I was… I cut my teeth in the industry by wearing some of the best made textiles in the world within this design category that I lived, and that California Cloth Foundry resides in.  And so, one thing I do want to say to support the luxury price point is that you are right, they do put a lot of… A lot of money in that price point goes into the textiles, as well as the assembling of the garments, as well as all the beautiful trims and bells and whistles, and how those pockets work, and how that collar lays, and all the infrastructure in the clothing. Even if it’s a cool, just casual tracksuit, done by let’s say Celine just did this beautiful fashion show, and it’s kind of an athleisure couture show. Check it out. I think it’s Spring-Summer ’21.  But anyway, so a lot of… It doesn’t really matter, the style, but a lot of effort and money goes into the assembling and into the ingredients and the materials. And then on top of that, you’ve got all of the very expensive marketing for the fashion shows, and for the models, and for the advertising, and for the… You know, that’s the escalated price there. But you know, the quality is there. So, as you said, we’re striving for creating something that is along the luxury product quality, and look and feel, without that price point. And it’s difficult. That’s where… Okay, so we’re in the sustainable world. How do we sustain a high quality product without that very high price point? That’s I think a challenge to everybody within the marketplace that we reside right now.  

LaChaun Moore:Absolutely. And I think that that’s something that is on the mind of every sustainable designer, is really figuring out how to navigate that space, and I have to say you all are doing such a phenomenal job at California Cloth Foundry.  

Lydia Wendt: Thank you.  

LaChaun Moore:One of the things that I’m also really interested in talking about is the masks that you create. You started producing them as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and I’ve had the opportunity to interact with them, but you can first start out by talking about how you began producing them and maybe telling people about the fabrics that you use when you produce and sell your mask.  

Lydia Wendt: Oh, thank you. Yeah, I’m so glad we got one to you, and I wanted to… Well, I just wanted to say, the mask… It’s crazy. We’re in this pandemic. It’s scary. It’s gonna be here for a while longer. We had no intention really of making and selling masks throughout the end of 2020 and 2021, but that’s probably what’s gonna happen, right?  So, let’s reverse back to the first quarter of this year, and in March, we were… Jan/Feb, we were just finishing up and just boxing up and all ready to ship our clothing to a number of small boutiques that we were excited to launch or collection with in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and they were saying, “Hey, slow down. Hold on. We’re not getting foot traffic. We’re not getting a lot of activity. There’s this scary COVID thing happening.” So, we waited, and then in March the world shut down, right? And it shut down fast, and we were told by the mayor’s office in Los Angeles… Obviously, everybody was told don’t come to work, and on the other side of that, we don’t have masks. Everybody needs masks. Healthcare workers need masks. Fashion industry, any, because L.A…. Los Angeles and New York are the two big fashion industry manufacturing hubs.  So, the mayor invited or asked, or pleaded, actually, for the fashion industry to, if we could, if we had the capacity, to come in and make masks. And as many as possible. And they actually sent us through their mask initiative in March, April maybe, but I think we went back in the end of March, the beginning of April, to our factory. They sent us specifications on the masks that they needed immediately, and so we downloaded the specifications, sent them to our pattern maker. We got permission to go in and we made as many masks as we could from the textiles that we had in inventory to make more clothing from. You know, for our line.  So, all of these masks that we quickly pivoted, because the world shut down, all of these masks that we have made and that we send out now with our clothing when people place orders, you can either buy a mask separately, or with… You buy a garment and you’ll get a matching mask. All of those masks are made from our clean, green textiles. And so, what you’re breathing through, you’re breathing through organic cotton washed in a little bit of soda ash and maybe some soft enzyme that is the same enzymes from the food industry that you make beer and cheese with.  If you’ve got a charcoal mask, you’re breathing through the same fabric that is on our clothing, that is in our clothing line. So, we pulled our rolls of fabric right off of our clothing line and put them into the mask program. And so, we got a lot of masks out to L.A., to L.A. Protects, and then what we did was we had a buy one, give one program. And we gave so many masks to so many amazing nonprofit and first responder groups, so we sent out I would say with the buy one, give one program, we sent probably about 6,000 masks out, and then with our amazing partnership with the Fiber Shed, the Fiber Shed said, “Hey, the Navajo Nation…” Now, this is the end of April, the first week of May.  No, end of April. The Navajo Nation is suffering, and they need masks, and they don’t have any. And we need to get them masks immediately. How do we do a fundraiser for that? And I said, “Well, why don’t we do a dye your mask medicinal mask dye program?” And she said, “That would be great.” So, they put that together and we did a workshop online, and we raised enough money to send almost 800 of our masks, and they sent 300 masks that were made by their Fiber Shed community, so we got a thousand masks out to the Navajo Nation by mid-May. Like May 10th or 12th. I think that’s when we got those masks out.  So, the reason we did that was because number one, we care, right? Number two, we were asked by the mayor’s office to go into work and make masks and make as many as possible. You know, we had to pay everybody to do this. That’s why we did a buy one, give one program. But we feel really good about that. You know, we pivoted because we’re local. Our supply chain is local. We had our fabrics in inventory, and we care. We wanted everybody to be safe.  And so, today, you’re breathing through if you have one of our masks, you’re breathing through plants, and minerals, and all of those plants and minerals are either from the food industry… You know, we buy our finishing green chemistry from the food industry, or they’re from organic cotton, TENCEL Modal, which is a beautiful branded fiber that’s super clean, gorgeous, by Lenzing.  

LaChaun Moore: And do you have any new projects that you’re working on?  

Lydia Wendt: So, new projects, we are developing a textile from a color grown cotton and climate beneficial wool blend, and that should be coming out in the next probably eight months, and then we’re also doing for summer 2021 a linen, color grown cotton, and white cotton blend, and so we’re playing… We’re really playing with some more blends, and working with… I can’t really say her name yet, but with a surfer in Los Angeles. She’s kind of a superstar surf celebrity and we’re going to put together a regenerative, naturally dyed and printed small capsule collection for her.  And just look for our next delivery of apparel. They’ll be popping up in the next probably end of January, beginning of February. Our next collection. So, that’s what’s happening with us.  

LaChaun Moore: Sounds amazing. It’s been wonderful talking to you. And before you go, we have one question that we ask everyone that joins the podcast, and that is do you have any advice or words of wisdom to share with weavers and textile enthusiasts?  

Lydia Wendt: Any advice to share with weavers and textiles enthusiasts. What I would say is number one, it’s so wonderful that people are actually creating their own textiles, because then they understand how they’re made, and with what ingredients they’re being made, and it really helps the… It really helps to spread the word on the care that goes into and the labor that goes into actually weaving something themselves, and then cutting and sewing it into a… I don’t know, a product.  As far as the advice for weavers on maybe ingredients, keep an eye out for all of these new blends coming out. Not just from us, but there’s innovators in my community around the world that are just creating amazing regenerative and biodegradable, compostable, beautiful naturally dyed natural ingredient yarns. And so, it’s a really exciting time for that.  As far as textiles enthusiasts, get some textiles. Dye them naturally. Go into your kitchen. Look at old ingredients on how to color your clothing and play around. It’s fun.  

LaChaun Moore: Amazing. Thank you so much.  

Lydia Wendt: You’re welcome. Thank you. I really enjoyed speaking with you and I can’t wait to see this. I love everybody that you’re interviewing. It’s so inspiring. Your community is fantastic.  

LaChaun Moore: That’s a wrap. If you’re interested in supporting Lydia’s work, you can find links in the show notes at www.GISTYarn.com/episode-130. Thank you for tuning into this week’s episode. Until next time, happy weaving.