Looking for an alternative to fast fashion, Eve Ogden Schaub decided to create a garment from homegrown flax
From crop tops to shorts and brightly patterned dresses, many of today’s clothes are the result of fast fashion. But one woman is taking a radical approach to challenging this trend by growing her own dress.
Eve Ogden Schaub is in the midst of a project to create a linen garment made from flax she is growing at home, documenting the process in videos shared on her Instagram account.
“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,” she says.
Schaub began the project in April 2025 when she turned a 600 sq ft vegetable garden in Vermont into a plot for growing flax. Having harvested the first crop, Schaub sowed and harvested a second. She is also learning to process the material in steps that would not sound amiss in a Grimms’ fairytale – sometimes enlisting family and friends to help.
“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 says, adding that she has yet to get to the latter step, but is growing indigo plants for the purpose.
Once the flax is spun into linen yarn, Shaub will weave it on a huge loom – not unlike Penelope in the Odyssey – before cutting out and sewing a dress. “So it’s an enormous undertaking, but something that not all that long ago was completely commonplace, and I found that a very attractive, interesting facet of the project,” she says.
As Schaub says, it has never been easier to get a cheap, convenient garment delivered to your door.
However “fast fashion” has become an environmental and health catastrophe, with garments ending up on huge rubbish dumps in Ghana and workers in India’s recycling factories experiencing ailments including lung disease.
In our current culture, “if you can do something cheaper and faster, it’s always the preferred option,” Schaub says. “And I want to step back and say: but is it? What might we stand to gain if we were to slow down and try to find things that are more meaningful to us, that bring us something that we can’t get from this fast-paced commercial world?”
Schaub also wants to explore the value of creativity, and question what benefits people may gain from making more things.
A self-described “fibre-person and maker”, Schaub is no stranger to lifestyle experiments, having written books on a number of projects, including her family’s attempts to give up sugar for a year, and to go 12 months without producing any rubbish.
The latter, says Schaub, dovetails with her new endeavour, noting that in avoiding waste, she learned about synthetic materials and the issues plastic poses for our environment and our bodies.
“Unfortunately, we’re all walking around wearing plastic bags most of the time, and we don’t even realise it,” she says.
Schaub hopes her project will shine a light on the implications of modern clothing – including the poor treatment and low pay of those producing such garments: “The whole system, I want to question and say, is this what we want?”
