A Very Slow Rebuttal to Fast Fashion: One Woman's Quest to Grow Her Own Dress

It may seem like "fast fashion," or the wave of quickly-made, cheap clothes that can be bought online, is taking the world by storm. Vermont native Eve Ogden Schaub is pushing back on that trend.

“I had this idea that I wanted to find the slowest fashion imaginable. And that’s when I had the idea I could grow a dress from seed in my back yard,” Schaub told The Guardian.

Schaub is tackling the task of making a dress from scratch. She is beginning by growing flax. It is a fibrous plant. It has been used to make clothes for centuries. Schaub converted her vegetable garden to flax in 2025. Since then, she has taught herself how to work flax into cloth.

“We retted it, which is a sort of decomposition process, and then you do breaking and scutching and hackling, and you have to spin and scour and then maybe dye your yarn,” she explained. Once it’s dyed, she’ll use an antique loom to weave it into cloth. That cloth can be sewn into a dress.

Ironically, Schaub has gone viral on social media for her low-tech work. Most people have been supportive, she says.

“I get so many people commenting on my social media posts saying, ‘Now I understand why clothes were so expensive (in the past), why cloth was a valuable commodity, why people only owned one or maybe two outfits, because it was so hard to get’,” Schaub told The Guardian.  

Reflect: If you had to make one thing you own completely from scratch, what would you pick and why?

Photo of clothes from fast-fashion brand Shein from Reuters.