Selvedge Magazine: Issue 114 Regeneration

Buy Issue 114 Regeneration of Selvedge magazine. The Industrial Revolution transformed the quiet rural backwater of East Lancashire into an engine of textile production. Lancashire was at the epicentre of a web that stretched across the globe, commandeering human and environmental resources across continents in a cycle of labour, manufacture, and trade, which we now know is unsustainable. This issue traces the routes of fibres and fabrics across centuries to and from the north of England, from the so-called "slave cloth," spun and woven by hand on the Pennine moors, to the bales of used fast fashion that now make their way from British high streets to the markets and toxic mountains of waste in West Africa.

The Lancashire landscape and its inhabitants have been shaped by an industry that grew over two centuries and has now all but disappeared. We might ask, can making textiles be regenerative? In response, artists from around the world present sustainable relationships between the land, the people who live on it, and the textiles that come from it, investigating pre-industrial models from homegrown, handspun flax in Blackburn to cotton production in Benin.

This issue is edited in collaboration with Laurie Peake of the British Textile Biennial.

What is Selvedge magazine?

Polly Leonard launched Selvedge magazine in 2004 to celebrate our cerebral and sensual addiction to cloth while promoting skilfully made and carefully considered textiles. Every issue features talented makers and their lives and stories. Polly believes the most interesting and evocative textile stories deserve to be shown in the best possible light and has thus created a magazine that is an aesthetically beautiful experience.