Fashion’s Next Mega Brand Is … A Farm?

Few ideas are as nebulous as sustainability in fashion. “What are we trying to sustain—the fires, the tornadoes, the mass extinction?” Aras Baskauskas, the CEO of Christy Dawn, asked my former colleague Emily Farra last year.  “We don’t need to be sustainable,” he added, “we need to be regenerative.” The Los Angeles-based womenswear brand Christy Dawn started using regeneratively farmed cotton, where the nutrients depleted by farming are restored to the soil and the damage to the environment is offset,  in 2021, which means that Bakauskas and co. are on their way to sequestering 22 pounds of carbon from the atmosphere per dress they produce. 

In upstate New York, the artist Dan Colen has a similar idea—and the land to make it happen. For nine years Colen has operated Sky High Farm, donating 100% of its yield to food insecure communities in New York. Now it’s becoming a brand. The SHF imprint will sell not only honey, jams, and salts, but also denim workwear, embroidered shorts, and chore coats in partnership with Dover Street Market. Call it Sky High Workwear.

“I saw this opportunity for a brand to emerge out of a mission as opposed to a mission emerging from a brand,” Colen told me. His goal is to use the sale of the clothing to raise money for the farm, now incorporated as a 501c3, and as an outreach tool to wake up consumers to regenerative farming and food insecurity throughout the United States. After an initial launch for spring 2022, Colen plans to expand his offering by using farming byproducts like hides from slaughterhouses and sheep’s wool.