Woman Grows Jeans+ in-person Q&A

Join us after the screening for a Q&A with Justine Aldersey-Williams (The Wild Dyery, Hoylake) and producer Perelandra Beedles.

In the industrial heartland 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. Woman Grows Jeans explores 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.

In 2020, fuelled by eco-anxiety and fear for her children’s future, Justine Aldersey-Williams founded a regenerative textile collective—a Fibreshed—in the Northern heartland of British industry. Aspiring to work with natural fibres and dyes in a country that no longer grew or processed them commercially, she initiated a collaboration with her friend Patrick Grant, a local clothier and judge on the BBC’s Great British Sewing Bee. They set out to help reintroduce heritage textile crops to British soil. Regenerative clothing could offer farmers new income streams, reduce dependence on fossil-fuelled fibres and dyes, and give consumers a real alternative to fast fashion.

In April 2021, together with SuperSlow Way and a community of volunteers, they planted flax and indigo in Blackburn—and so began the Homegrown Homespun experiment. Could they grow a prototype pair of jeans by that October, and bring them to market through Patrick’s social enterprise, Community Clothing, in time for the British Textile Biennial in 2023?

Justine Aldersey-Williams is a Wirral-based regenerative clothing activist, botanical textile dyer, and founder of the Northern England Fibreshed. From her studio The Wild Dyery in Hoylake, she has taught natural fabric dyeing to thousands of students worldwide, sharing skills that connect people to the land through plant-based colour.