From snout to stitch
How fashion can learn from food’s nose-to-tail ethos.
Clams and Trotter
Roast Bone Marrow and Parsley Salad
Salt Hereford Frisee and Red Onion
…. and Roast Dexter, please.
More wine? The waiter nods down towards my near empty glass. Yes, please, same again, and off he goes to the pass in his canteen-style trousers and white butcher’s shirt.
St John, Smithfield, is where I’m starting this text. A good place to start, to get to the heart of the matter.
The nose-to-tail restaurant has concocted something of a cult-like following through its commitment to the best of British ingredients, an essence that remains untouched by trends or pretension. St. John has always had a cautious attitude to fashion. In the words of the restaurants founder, Fergus Henderson: “cooking is constant; trends come and go.”
A simple disposition - honest - uncomplicated. So as I smear roasted bone marrow across a piece of toast, I wonder why fashion cannot adopt a similar approach.
Provenance is often ubiquitous with food, but doesn’t connect with fibre in the same way.
Alice V Robinson is one designer who has made this connection, by looking into the origin story of leather and the connections between field to fork and into fashion.
By pushing the boundaries of what we consume, Robinson challenges our relationship to the clothes we wear and the food we eat. As a fellow contributor at the V&A Museums’s “FOOD: Bigger than the plate” exhibit, in 2019, she embodies a zero-waste, nose-to-tail ethos, like that of St. John, in her garments.
In 2019, Robinson made an assortment of garments and accessories from one bullock: an elegant coat, boxy handbag and kitten-heeled boots. Known in life as ‘374’, the bullock is immortalised in leather and silver. The number 374 sort of tricks you—it’s just digits, until it’s not, until you remember it was alive. Robinson used 374's hide for leather, its bones for buttons, and even its blood and fat for dyes and finishes. On presenting the collection, to ensure her audience’s appetites were satiated, around on silver trays came little beef burgers in glossy brioche. Because nothing says commitment like making people eat the project.
Before 374, there was 11458. A sheep, hand-selected by Robinson and followed from field to slaughter before designing a collection to make use of the entire animal. Robinson explained to me that the collection was “a collaboration of design and restriction, working within sheep nature’s pre-defined parameters. Decisions about drape, colour, square footage available to design from, were all made for me.” Her choice in keeping 11458 and 374’s numbers as the name of each collection emphasises this contrast between the animals’ worth in one industry and abandonment in the other.
There’s a lot of discourse around “sustainable leather” versus alternatives like plant-based or lab-grown materials- discourse that Robinson, who grew up on a small farm in rural Shropshire, is neither ignorant nor insensitive too. “I think my work is challenging because so much of our meat and dairy industry is highly intensive and has had a detrimental impact on natural ecosystems, human health and animal welfare. Shifting this perspective too, ‘what farming practices do I want to support?' provides opportunities to design better and differently.” Her work underscores the power of material provenance, tracing fashion’s raw ingredients back to their source.
Robinson took the food industry’s way of confronting waste and applied it to fashion. Her resource-led process and zero-waste objective enabled her to work creatively and respectfully within the limits posed by what was available.
The process also demanded slowness, that desirable but elusive antidote to fashion’s rampant hunger. There’s no mystery supply chains, no vague ‘ethically sourced’ labels. Simply transparency, from snout to stitching.
By now I’ve finished my entree, and in front of me sits roast Dexter, roasted carrots, potatoes. That’s a carrot top pesto, the waiter explains of a green sauce that dresses the vegetables.
The Textile Garden for Fashion Revolution is an installation of flora and fauna designed to highlight the deep connections between textiles, plants, and sustainability- essentially, the idea that we can grow our own clothes. The concept took root when designer Lottie Delamain was trekking in Northern Vietnam, where she observed Hmong families cultivating indigo and hemp alongside their vegetables to make textiles. “They were incredibly beautiful batiked and embroidered textiles, born of the humblest ingredients. I was struck by the proximity they had to their clothes, the intimate understanding they had of where their clothes came from and how they were produced,” Delamain explains in a conversation with Fashion Revolution.
The garden design imitated pieces of fabric; flowers planted in distinctive monochromatic patterns, inspired by Anni Albers’ intuitive understanding of materials and colour, created the impression of woven cloth. Plants including valerian, nettle, madder and cow parsley were supplied by UK nurseries and growers, chosen for their use as fibres or textile dyes in commercial or craft use.
The textile garden reinforced Fashion Revolution’s mission to foster transparency in the industry, urging consumers to ask, Who Made my Clothes? and What are they Made of? By physically placing visitors within the materials of their garments, the garden challenged this disconnect between fashion and the environment. It re-established the connection between plants and textiles, revealed the beauty to be found in plant-based dyes and fibres, creating fertile ground for us to be curious about what we wear.
John Skelton is a designer who is innately curious in the world around him. Working purely with materials that are naturally occurring, Skelton sources English wools, Irish linens, hemp and small amounts of hand-woven Indian cottons to create a rich tapestry of colours and textures within each collection. Signature patchwork jumpers, for instance, are made from multiple types of Hebridean woollen yarns, celebrating the natural colourations of the sheep. Rustic browns, auburns, and mottled khakis are interrupted only by the occasional accent of deep ocean blue or shining scarlet neckerchiefs, features that feel aligned with nature’s own finer details- a golden line of sunlight or a splash of yellow gorse flower.
Skelton proves that sustainability is not about revolutionary realisations or newfound magic ingredients, it’s about harvesting what we already have.
Carolien Niebling’s ‘Food Futurism’ emphasises this point further. The Zurich based designer and researcher specialises in food-related projects, using design to unite the fields of science and sustenance. Fashion Revolution’s question: Who Made my Clothes? Is echoed in Niebling’s dissection of what’s in our food. You are what you eat, or so it goes, but just how much do we really know what goes into the food we consume?
The Sausage of the Future, Niebling’s most acclaimed work, addresses food production head on. Niebling treats the humble sausage as a site for experimentation, merging traditional butchery techniques with modern food science to imagine a more sustainable approach to meat consumption. Her research-led exploration proposes a rainbow variety of different fillings for a variety of sausages, from sweet apple and chocolate saucisson to a multicoloured mortadella studded with broccoli, romanesco, cauliflower and carrot.
“Invented over 5000 years ago and developed ever since, the sausage is a true design object,” Niebling states on her website. Its unusual to hear the mixture of ground meat, fat and herbs spoken of in such high regard outside of a restaurant like the one I’m sitting in, but I’m open to it.
Niebling challenges our perceptions of value, showing that materials we dismiss as “inedible” can actually be delicious and nutritious. She’s asking whether a sausage could be made from hybrid ingredients without losing its essence, the same way some fashion designers now ask whether a leather jacket can exist without an animal, or if silk can be produced without a silkworm.
I order some bread to soak up the lingering juices left on my plate.
Parblex, or, plastic from potatoes, demonstrates a way in which food and fashion can naturally intersect, turning food scraps into bioplastics. Pioneered by London-based Chip[s] Board, whose designs are composed of bioplastics and bioplastic composites made from the food we leave behind. Humble scraps, supplied by McCain UK’s abundant potato waste stream, are repurposed into high value products- eyewear, buttons and fastenings that will biodegrade at the end of their life. Unlike conventional plastics, which take hundreds of years to decompose, Parblex is biodegradable and compostable. By repurposing scrap potatoes into high-quality materials, Chip[s] Board supports the industry’s shift away from fast fashion’s extractive practices toward more regenerative, circular systems. Sustainability doesn’t come at the cost of style or substance- Parblex plastics have a mottled, semi-transparent appearance with unique organic textures.
Whether through regenerative farming, circular design, or biomaterial innovation, there is a shift toward a more considered way of creating and consuming. The question remains: if we demand to know the origins of what we eat, why wouldn’t we do the same for what we wear?
Perhaps, then, the future of fashion is not unlike the philosophy of a well-cooked meal: inventive, resourceful, and locally sourced.