Sally Fox - Organic Cotton Pioneer & Founder of FoxFibre
After 35 years of admiring her work from afar, Safia finally met her long-admired hero, Sally Fox. They spoke together at the Japan World Expo alongside other sustainable fashion and textile pioneers.
Sally Fox (born 1955) is a United States cotton breeder who breeds naturally coloured cotton varieties in California. She is the inventor of Foxfibre®️.
Fox invented the first environmentally friendly coloured cotton varieties that could be spun into thread on a machine. Fox has been called a 'cotton pioneer' for her efforts in organic, coloured cotton and heirloom wheat.
→ You're a biodynamic farmer. When you hear all this talk about regenerative this and regenerative that, what does it look like to you? After all, you're a pioneer.
Oh, it's just such greenwashing. It's so ridiculous. These people do one little thing; all of a sudden, they're using no-till. Like, all of a sudden, tillage is some monstrosity. They say all these preposterous things about tilling.
The whole thing, in my opinion, is funded by the GMO people who can use herbicides on the plants, and they want to have something good to say about themselves. Okay, good, let's be happy that they are trying; that's a good thing, but to pretend that anything regenerative is anything like actual organic is so laughable.
And then you have these preposterous people, these rich brands, who have now imposed another label called regenerative organic, which confuses the whole marketplace and implies that organic isn't regenerative.
It's this constant challenge posed by people who do nothing, who are used to taking money for everything and imposing their will on those who do the work.
→ How are we going to navigate this rather polarised, difficult place that we've got to in the world? How are we going to move forward to this new wellbeing, post-growth economy, this good society? How are we going to do it?
Well, I base my vision on what I've experienced over the last 30 years here in Japan, where it's very much centred on people working directly with one another in a collaborative, respectful way.
None of this vulture capitalism, or, as I am now calling it, predator capitalism. It's about respectful capitalism and modest profit margins.
Margins that are so modest that you don't have money to pay anybody to make you look good.
You have to genuinely make something good that, when the person buys it, they feel it was worth it. They will know the story behind it because you have a relationship with them, and they have a relationship with their customer. AI, in my opinion, will amplify the value of the connections people have with each other because it will take care of those who don't care. They will be sucked into everything in the metric world. Perhaps they will be happier off in that world, but the rest of us will touch things, do things, and make things, and be connected with those who get it.
→ What’s special about Fox Fibres? We know it's organic cotton; we know that you've been doing it for three or more decades. Are you wearing your fibres?
This is the brown cotton span at Taishoboseki; it’s 80% my variety named Coyote, 20% Sea Island cotton. Taishoboseki is so incredible, so sophisticated as a spinner, that the inside of the yarn is ‘Sea Island’ and the outside of the yarn is the ‘Coyote’.
So you get the full strength of the colour, but you also have this additional longevity of the product because of the extremely strong inner core.
→ You have a scientific background. What is it that brought you to thinking about organic cotton and, rather than dyeing them, actually using these natural pigments?
Well, they are tannins. In fact, in Japan, they call this cotton tea cotton because you have brown tea and green tea. And they are tannins that make the colour, which is what gives tea its colour. It's the same material, but it's in the cotton.
It's in the fibre. As a youth, I became inspired by this African scientist, Elizabeth Wangari, to study entomology and plant pathology, hoping to be part of the team that would reduce pesticide misuse.
You can't just scream about pesticides all you want, but if the locusts come, what are you going to do? Right? You have to have solutions at hand. You can’t go around telling people you can't use pesticides.
So I studied biological control and sophisticated chemistry, all of which was part of the team that reduced the misuse of pesticides. One way to do this is to breed plants that are resistant to pests, diseases, or both. While I was working for a cotton breeder, breeding white cottons, I found a bag of brown cotton in a drawer. The brown cotton had been given to all the independent breeders by the USDA. The brown cottons were supposed to be highly resistant to the common plant diseases and pests.
And the thing was that the regular cotton breeders didn't want to deal with the colour. They wanted pest and disease resistance, but not the colour.
But when I saw the colour, I wanted to make it easier to spin; I thought this was the solution. If we had resistant cotton plants, organic cotton could become a reality. And that's where this began.
→ What other natural cotton colours are there besides brown and green? How many acres are you growing cotton on?
Well, the production completely depends on who's ordering the cotton prior to planting it and whether they're reliable, whether they're going to pay for the cotton once it's grown and delivered. So back in the 1990s, when all this was just starting out, I learned the hard way that the mill ordering had to have integrity.
My breeding nurseries are separate from production, and each is always between 1 and 10 acres because they're full of hundreds or thousands of small plots. In my breeding nursery, I have lines that produce various colours produced by tannins, such as browns, greys, and rust colours. Then there are the green colour family, which can range from yellow to a grey green that some call a teal colour. But production depends on orders, and back in the 90s we were up to 10,000 acres of production. That scale.
→ Who did you start supplying your organic cotton to?
The first customer I had was a mill in Japan called Yamadabo. They came to me because they needed to produce a ceremonial garment for the emperor's coronation in 1989.
And they needed naturally coloured cotton for this garment. And I never found out what it was that they made. But the designer in Japan, Hiroko Koshino, picked it up and started making things with my cotton. And then other designers picked it up. From Japan, it kind of spread, and in time, within three years,
I was selling to 38 spinning mills around the world, with 40 farmers under contract. Because of that business, I was able to scale up organic cotton farming. This was the first major production of organic cotton before it became a billion-dollar industry. It was a million-dollar industry, based on the resistance these cottons had to diseases and pests. The farmers still had the challenge of dealing with weeds and other issues, but at least they weren't worrying about diseases and pests.
Then, when the textile industry went through its painful metamorphosis and no longer wanted these cottons, part of the reason was the cost of dyeing, which might have been a dollar a pound. But the cost of cleaning up the dye was two to three dollars a pound. And that was in countries where there were rules and regulations about dye waste, because dyes are toxic. Chemical dyes are toxic. So we went from 38 mills buying from us around the world to zero. Within two years, what year was that? 1995 and 96.
→ And how did you get back on your feet?
Well, here I want to show you these socks - oh, they're gorgeous, so that's the green. And the cotton in this green, I grew in 1995. I am still using cotton grown in 1995. I have half a bale of this colour left. That's how difficult it is.
So people come to me and say, 'Oh, I want to buy seeds.' And I'm like, 'Oh, no, you don't. You do not want to. You want to hold onto it for 30 years.'
→ Can you tell me about how you came up with the name Fox Fibres?
So the name Fox Fibre was arrived at by my friend, the one who designed the logo.
She was a ceramic artist, and her work was beautiful. I wanted to be her agent, and she's been my best friend since we were young. She came up with the idea of calling it Fox fibre, which I thought was too egotistical to use my name. She pointed out that there were these books called the Fox Fire books, which were very popular among those of us in the 60s.
It was all this sort of back-to-the-land stuff. All the crafts were written up in these books called the Foxfire books, so I came to like the word because it reminded me of those books. I, of course, was devoted to crafts. I used to spin. I started hand spinning. Then I blew glass. I did ceramics. I was always good enough to appreciate who was better than I was, and I began to find my niche as the person who would prepare the materials. For instance, I realised I wasn't great at glassblowing, so I started making the glass formulas. I studied chemistry and took courses in glass and glazes in college, and I would spend my time preparing the glass formula every day for the glassblowers and the ceramicists. So that's my way of living. My niche, I feel, is being good enough at the craft to appreciate who's really good. And then I've wanted to be the supplier of the materials that would be worthy of their touch.
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(Images by Sally Fox via Instagram & Noah Johnson)