261: How to plant a seed so that good clothes grow

What makes good clothes good? I went on the Baserange trail to find out.

“Good” clothes can be “good” for many reasons—an Arnys leather coat is very different from a Flore Flore t-shirt, which is very different from a Row handbag, which is miles apart from a pair of Patagonia Baggies, but they are all good in their own way. So what is it that makes good clothes good? It’s a layered question, and I’m trying to answer it in earnest without veering into the poetic or preachy.

Here’s what I think—across their many camps, a few ruling edicts bring good clothes together. Whatever else good fashion is, it must first be these things:

1. Long-lasting

2. Flattering, well-fitting, and enjoyable to wear

3. Possessing a point of view

4. Harmless

How brands go about achieving these (relative and subjective) things can look wildly different from one operation to the next.

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In July, I went to France with Baserange. I wanted to observe first-hand how a brand I consider to offer Good Clothes—from a taste and wearability standpoint—goes about making those clothes Good at every step of production before they reach me, the consumer.

One thing I’ve always appreciated about Baserange is the absence of hardened walls between its ideation and creation and marketing phases, unlike with some brands that would have you believe the story begins and ends with a creative director (or worse, that a pair of pants was conjured out of thin air). Baserange is very unified in body and mind in that way. On its website, you can read about the source of every fiber found in its clothes and every factory it partners with. On Instagram, you’ll find videos of those worksites, and in its lookbooks, you’ll find their employees modeling the collections. The brand will be the first to say what dyes it uses, who spins its yarns, what third-party organizations are overseeing labor practices and water usage.

These things matter because they will tell you, in plain language, whether the clothes you’re contemplating are in fact good, or no good. Walking through the origin story of a Baserange garment helped me identify qualities in clothes that I value. Here are some of them:

— when clothes are “grown,” the living things they come from are king

Plants are powerful, animals too (so are old sweaters, which I’ll get to in a bit), but in this case, I’m talking about hemp. There’s a reason people go crazy for natural fibers, it being because a crop like hemp, when converted into a yarn and then a fabric, possesses a bunch of innate qualities that sound like the stuff of science fiction: it’s antibacterial, mold-resistant, UV-protectant (!), thermoregulating, moisture-wicking. It provides fibers that can be as long as 15 feet (compared to cotton’s 1.6 inches), which means gorgeously smooth, fine, durable fabrics. Plus farmers generally adore it.

Hemp is basically all upside, so obviously it’s controversial.

Baserange works with the supplier VirgoCoop, which acts as sort of a union for hemp farmers in an effort to revive the ecological powerhouse. The organization has gone to bat for this super-fiber, which used to be a much bigger thing in the region until the cotton industry fanned the flames on marijuana outrage and outlawed the growing of its cousin crop. It’s not just the government Virgo is butting up against, but industry bullies too, like the seed monopolizer recycling debunked THC paranoia to block growers from collecting and planting their own seeds. Hmm!

I heard a similar story from L'Atelier des Bleus Pastel d'Occitanie, a mother-daughter operation almost single-handedly reviving woad dying in the region. (Together, they hand-dyed more than 1,000 pieces for a Baserange capsule with the plant responsible for France’s iconic pale blue tint.) Like hemp, woad is a super-plant. It’s antibacterial, anti-viral, and anti-parasitic; L’Atelier’s Denise Lambert says the many-thousand-year-old extract was originally used for its healing properties, and only then did it gain popularity for the color it imparts. Today, the industry can’t compete with cheap synthetics, which offer nothing of the sort.

All of which to say, hemp and woad are hardly the easiest materials to reach for when making clothes, but there are agents of change inconveniencing themselves every day to bring this stuff to a broader audience. They do it because they recognize what lesser brands could never: that clothing can be medicine.

— even when not of earthly origins, the source of the fibers is closely considered

Circling back to old sweaters. Baserange works with a member of the Chanel group that you’re unlikely to hear about elsewhere: Filatures du Parc, a knitwear-recycling plant doing something partly crazy, wholly amazing with basically thrift store junk. Used knits made of at least 90% wool are gathered by the ton and sorted by shade. Then, Filatures blends the material into yarns in custom colors for each of its clients (including, yes, Chanel). The blacks will be the deepest blacks and the whites the purest ivories, but the artfully combined hues in between have a beautifully heathered depth, achieved with absolutely zero dye.

I asked our guide, who has been the facility manager for over 15 years, if he also thought the recycled fibers—made from sweaters that’d been worn, washed, lived in, and otherwise drawn through the elements—felt softer to the touch than the virgin wool displayed beside it: “I do, but I can’t prove it yet.”

— it’s nice to see the relationship between the mechanical process of making clothes and the manual practice that preceded it

Virgo—the hemp org—commissioned this big machine that sort of squishes and arranges its several-meters-long hemp stalks into pinwheels that can then be sent for yarn spinning (to someplace in Poland because there are only something like four machines that do this left in existence post-cannabis panic). What I liked about watching the machine was how it seemed to perform the actions of a pair of hands, breaking up and organizing fibers into tidy little bundles, but on a loud, industrial level that can work through sizable portions of harvested field at a time.

The looms at VirgoCoop’s facilities in Castres (where yarn returns to after being spun in Poland) are where the magic happens, for me at least. Hemp yarns are arranged warpwise, and can then be combined with more hemp in the weft. Or, it can be matched with silk, or cotton, or recycled wool, or whatever, to achieve any number of targeted qualities in the final fabric. This synergy can also happen on the yarn level, where mismatched fibers are spun into a single thread, but I was particularly ticked being able to physically see the complementary fibers intersecting at a million little crossroads. I think that complexity is very intrinsically satisfying—just think how much we all love denim, which gets its signature texture from a mismatched warp and weft that, as it were, was originally made with woad-dyed fibers.

— a woman riding a bicycle through a sheep pasture

In this case, it was the owner of Baserange’s knitwear facility, Missègle, who introduced us to her flock across the street (I met a newborn donkey, too). But really, whatever a brand needs to do to integrate a woman riding a bicycle through a pasture should be seriously considered.

— designers who are kind, curious savants

I met Stine Kinch, who’s been designing for Baserange for a decade, give or take. She joined our tiny group of editors at the factory tours and “enrichment” pit stops, and at moments I felt like I could see her creative process taking place in real time, or at least, I was curious enough as to the inspiration she was extracting that I made a point to follow her eye. Do you ever meet someone who you just love to watch think? At Missègle, picking up knit scraps from bins and arranging them in thoughtful forms; selecting samples from Virgo’s weaving facility to tuck into her pouch of ideas that had been growing over the week (a Montbell pouch, no less!); up close against the wall of wool inside the silos at Filatures du Parc to better understand its constitution.

It takes a patient and curious person to translate these powerful raw materials into products of matched spiritual heft—an upright creative conduit—and I appreciated feeling that energy in Stine.

— storytelling is a story of what actually happens

I would never malign marketing, or the right of a brand to get the message out about what they are offering. But if we don’t know what makes good clothes good, we make it very easy for someone to tell us that it’s the celebrities or the viral moments or the runway music that make fashion worth buying. Those things can be great, and the people involved talented, but they can also be distractions to keep you from paying attention to the integrity of the thing that’s meant to be held against your skin.

Baserange’s founder Blandine Legait (alongside cofounder Marie-Louise Mogensen) said that for her, it’s important that the communication and imagery reflect the people involved in making it. Photographer Dan McMahon has shot a decade’s worth of lookbooks and has shaped Baserange’s signature look and feel. Stylist Giovanna Flores has styled nearly as many. The models are cast from the factories of the brand’s suppliers or from their community, and the team collaborates with talent on dressing; selecting pieces that they would want to wear on their own, showing them comfortable in their own skin and looking great in interesting clothes. This approach turns to the source—the pieces themselves and the people involved in making them—to dictate what the story is. Baserange’s clothes are good because they tell the story of Baserange.

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