Thu 02 Oct
|Huddersfield
Film Screening: Woman Grows Jeans
When an ambitious experiment between a textile activist and a celebrity clothier meets inevitable challenges, one woman is propelled into an initiation that makes British fashion history.
Time & Location
02 Oct 2025, 18:30 – 20:00
Huddersfield, The Piazza Centre, Unit 42-44 Princess Alexandra Walk, Huddersfield HD1 2RS, UK
About the event
In a northern post-industrial landscape of British textiles, a community sets out to do something unprecedented - grow jeans from scratch.
With hopes of helping regenerate harmful fashion systems, they begin planting flax and indigo, spinning yarn, and weaving cloth. When the dream of bringing them to market falters, the challenge of creating a prototype is taken on by Justine Aldersey-Williams, transforming the experiment into a personal rite of passage. What unfolds is a tender, radical act of reconnection: to land, lineage, lost skills, and the ‘more-than-human’ world.
With a community of volunteers, they envisioned homegrown jeans sold through a social enterprise, but their work exposed uncomfortable truths about the systems controlling industry. Despite its sophistication, the U.K. can no longer produce clothing without importing materials or causing harm.
In a country buying 70 million pairs a year, Woman Grows Jeans journeys into our resilient ancestry to reclaim the care and agency that’s key to regeneration. What unfolds is a tender, radical act of reconnection: to land, lineage, and the almost lost skills of the ‘more-than-human’ world.
After 600 hours, the UK’s only pair of homegrown jeans were handmade - not as a relic, but as a provocative signpost toward the future our hearts know is possible. A celebration of the traditional skills that reconnect us to nature’s wisdom, Woman Grows Jeans is an uplifting film about what it really means to rewild our world, our wardrobes and ourselves.
At once a protest and a prayer, this is slow fashion as provocation: sown by hand, infused with love, and stitched with hope. For anyone who’s ever wondered if a different future is possible, this pioneering story shows that the power to create change is still in our hands.
"It's incredible, to see woad and flax - plants native to the Northern England Fibershed's ecosystem transformed by community, and the passion and talent of Justine into the most functional and necessary garment. She weaves her clothes and her community into this materially and spiritually transformative project." Rebecca Burgess - Founding Director of Fibershed