Author Bella Gonshorovitz shares her ideology on creating circularity at home, from the seeds in the garden to the garments in your wardrobe
Grow, Cook, Dye, Wear – Bella Gonshorovitz’s book
A miniature circular economy highlights the journey from seed to crop, from harvest to plant-based cooking, food waste to DIY natural dyeing and contemporary dressmaking. Five crops; blackberry, cabbage, nettle, onion and rhubarb play leading roles in this book by Bella Gonshorovitz, as they carry the reader through each step or process: grow, cook, dye, wear..
Aarushi Saxena: How was the book Grow, Cook, Dye, Wear born? What does it motivate readers to do?
Bella Gonshorovitz: I have been growing crops, cooking vegan and sewing clothes for many years. It was when I got my allotment that I started cultivating on a larger scale and explored natural dyes. I saw myself connecting everything to create this sort-of miniature circular economy. Thinking what I can do with it – led me to ideas of founding a club where members can purchase items and also get an experiential dinner. This was small-scale, yet financially unviable.
During the pandemic, I was making protective gowns for doctors in hospitals since the UK had a shortage. Then the title came to my head – Grow, Cook, Dye, Wear. I made the onion dyed dress from upcycled fabrics for myself, showed it to my agent – who helped me put together a proposal. It took three months for me to get the book down. It became a vehicle for me to share this ideology and everything played out organically.
The aim here isn’t for readers to grow all of their vegetables, hand make all clothes, or even convert to a strict vegan diet. It is about establishing a more intimate connection with nature and finding a new perspective on mass-produced products. With clothes, as with vegetables, the end product is often presented in a manner detached from its origins and it’s too easy to forget that everything we eat, consume and wear comes from nature.
AS: What is the elaborated concept of garden to garment?
BG: Grow, Cook, Dye, Wear aims to inspire a more sustainable way of life. The reader goes through a cycle of four stages for each crop. The first step is hunting, growing or foraging for produce, then there’s cooking with five vegan or plant-based recipes. We now know that having a plant-based diet is one of the most beneficial things one can do for the environment in terms of personal behavior. Each recipe also highlights the waste needed in order to create the dye at the next step. From the onion recipes their skin is saved for dyeing processes. In the book’s dye section, I share instructions on how to extract dye and a color map for each crop. The final step is making the garment using all the patterns provided in a separate pocket within the book. Starting from seeds and landing at a finished hand-made garment, is a real slow fashion process.
AS: You introduce ‘a miniature circular economy’ – what are the challenges in adapting this into daily lifestyles?
BG: Even with a large land allotment of 125 sq mtr, it is impossible to grow everything I eat. I cook most things from scratch but not all my food comes from there. Even as a professional fashion designer, most of the clothes I wear are made by me, but not all of them. It is key for me to declare this to readers. The key takeaway from this concept is regarding today’s consumption habits. It’s about making conscious decisions particularly in the context of clothes. Example, visiting a store with a 5$ garment, but knowing what’s gone into its construction, will make you question how it can cost less than the sandwich in the café next door?
The idea is to embody circular economy as something approachable – where you can capture its essence in the title of the book itself. Every stage has tangible results that are in the reader’s hands. Since this circularity is on a small scale – starting in your own garden, in your kitchen with your own sewing machine, I call it miniature. However, it is challenging to live that way or even do the whole process of the book in just one season.
I encourage readers to approach the book at their own pace. Maybe you’ll just grow onions and make recipes, maybe you’ll save skins from store bought onions when you cook the recipes and dye fabrics or maybe you’ll just upcycle fabric and make your own dress using the patterns. The whole process is slow in itself. You start with the onion, perhaps in spring and harvest in autumn, cook with it, collect enough skins to dye the fabric and make the dress over winter so it’s ready to wear next spring.
AS: What is the circular economy of soil?
BG: Demystifying and personalizing circularity is one of the key objectives of this book, and for that, there is no better place to start than the soil. As you grow vegetables, they draw their nutrients from the earth, so if you don’t replenish them your land will soon be depleted, resulting in a poor harvest and disease. Soil can be enriched with organic matter – from manure of horses and chicken, or using leftover food waste that does not contain meat.
I was moved by the idea that the most precious commodity in the allotments is horse manure. We get droppings delivered twice a year – and then there’s a gold rush to obtain it. It shows this wonderful concept that absolutely nothing is waste, everything that comes from the land or nature can go back to nature. Everything is charged with its value. Much like the cooking scraps I add to my compost heap, horse droppings are usually considered to be the ultimate end of a cycle – waste generated as a by-product of extracting nutrients from food consumed by humans and animals. Not only can we use this rubbish to create new plant life, but the fact that it nourishes insects and grows more food is inspiring. It’s the best, most natural embodiment of a circular economy, something that’s often perceived as an academic and lofty concept.
AS: Can you explain the reason behind choosing the five crops?
BG: I was looking at anything that would grow locally in my allotment, shortlisting six crops. The one that I left out was beetroot, because like cabbage its dye doesn’t last very long and it gets less impressive results. Onion is a great choice, as it can be cultivated easily and if people lack space to grow it, it’s common enough to be able to source skins. Nettle and blackberry can be foraged in the UK. Rhubarb is a zero waste plant – dye with the roots and eat the stalks; the leaves are poisonous but powerful mordants to prepare fabric for dyeing.
With respect to dyeing, cabbage is not an ideal dye plant as it creates temporary but beautiful colors. The same applies to blackberry, as compared to rhubarb and nettle. The idea of reinventing garments by re-dyeing feeds into consumers’ needs for novelty.
AS: The term plant-based fashion has been making a regular appearance in the media recently. Thoughts?
BG: It is an interesting concept that can be unpacked in many ways. Many people describe my book as ‘how to grow your own clothes’. Obviously to grow the fiber and dye it, requires a level of ambition that would be quite hard to promote as a mainstream experience. Right now, the book offers a very feasible experience that does not involve growing plants to extract fiber, dyeing those and then weaving them into a fabric. In the context of my book that will also be counterproductive because I want people to engage with circularity in an approachable way.
It is however intriguing to call anything plant-based as it is a reminder to consumers that everything we consume comes from nature.
AS: How does one dye clothes at home?
BG: What is to stress is that it’s not an activity that you need to be engaged in the whole day. There is a process of preparing a fabric. If it’s a new fabric from the store, what I call a virgin textile in my book – it needs to be rewashed first. Though working with upcycled fabric is efficient, because natural dyes work great in obscuring stains.
The first stage is mordanting – borrowing from a French term, mordant helps the dye to bite into the fabric. I recommend alum (aluminum potassium sulfate) which is what the fabric has to be cooked in. Also used in food processing, alum is not poisonous in small quantities and it is a natural mineral. People often forget that not everything that’s natural is safe.
Once the fabric is mordanted, it’s ready to be dyed. But there are also modifiers and mixers that come into play. ‘Mixers’ is a term that I’ve coined. I use it to refer to certain traditional dye plants that I incorporate into the dye bath to add color. For example, madder – it can be harvested only three to five years after growing and the roots are used to obtain the dye. Modifiers are interesting because when you dye something, it is very rare to get two identical results. There are so many factors that influence color. One of them is pH level in water – modifiers like lemon help intentionally change the pH level and so a murky brown can become pink.
AS: What are the considerations in writing down a dye recipe?
BG: My tentative dye ‘recipes’ are for 100g of fabric. It is hard to write down a dye recipe; from one day to the next so many things can change, affecting the shade of dye obtained. It may vary depending on the fabric, water pH level, time in the foraging season, the freshness and quality of the crop etc. The reason recipes are included in the book is to show people a tentative spectrum of colors they can achieve.
Over the last couple of workshops I’ve conducted, I used the same pot of water and the same amount of onions, but one created a yellow dye the other olive – It’s an uncontrollable process.
For example, using an iron mordant with the berries will produce spellbindingly deep, dusky blues, while adding an iron mordant to the pesky bramble branches and shoots will extract bluish-green, dusty greens.
AS: In industrial dyeing, the waste water creates the highest environmental impact. What is the disposal process in domestic dyeing – can there be any harmful impacts?
BG: It is safe to be disposed of in the drain. Water rich in nettle can be fed to plants. Alum water, or the mordanting water could be given to hydrangea plants. Dyeing is however a heat and water resource-intensive process. I always feel that everything can continually be more sustainable but nothing is ever truly sustainable.
In comparison, natural dyeing is a less harmful practice. Given the recent drought, we have to think about our water consumption a lot more, especially as it will become more of a problem in the years to come.
AS: You speak about the link between fashion and psychology, in a context to who you become on the journey of making your own clothes. Can you elaborate on this?
BG: I have an MA in applied psychology in fashion and spent a long time researching the idea of identity in clothing. The idea that clothes are imbued with memories is supported by scientific research. We come to embody the clothes and they influence the way we think, feel and function. There’s a link between this phenomenon and the desire to buy new clothes – they carry a promise of who we may become while wearing them. In that context, this book attempts something radical – clothes emerging from the processes of this book say more about the past rather than the fantasy of the future. When you hand-make something, from the book, it’s about the experience of creating the garment – think about the onions that grew from seeds, a process which took months. Then the cooking and waste collection that led to the dyeing of the fabric. This finally culminated in a garment.
We have to reconsider our relationship with clothes. Through fast fashion we are bombarded with clothes and they have become disposable. The common phenomena now is that people wear things once and then throw it away, particularly in the UK. I find that baffling. If you went through the journey of making the garment, you would never throw it – you would mend it, pass it along to family and friends, it becomes a part of you and you become a part of it.
The book also tells my story – because I worked as a designer for big fashion houses around the world and became incredibly disillusioned by the industry. I really wanted to find a way to work that agrees with nature and has less of a societal cost.
Bella Gonshorovitz
Fashion designer who opened her made-to-measure studio in East London in 2012, creating fine clothes designed for longevity. Her book Grow, Cook, Dye, Wear: From seed to sustainable fashion’ was published in early 2022 and narrates her clear, engaging vision of how to live sustainability.
