Watching - Woman Grows Jeans - the Film

I sat down to watch Woman Grows Jeans this weekend thinking it would be an interesting, niche documentary about slow textiles. It was about growing flax for linen so completely in line with what I am researching for my MA.

I’d been aware of this project for a while, so was delighted to see that it had finally come to fruition. Instead, it got under my skin. Justine Aldersey-Williams’s decision to grow, spin, dye, weave and stitch a pair of jeans from scratch is one of the most audacious, ordinary, and moving things I’ve seen in a long time.

Remembering What We’ve Lost

Jeans are so familiar, such a commonplace piece of clothing that we hardly notice them. They’re stacked in shops, sold for a handful of notes, worn until they fade and then tossed away. But this film pulled the curtain back on what jeans really are: the end of an extraordinarily long and fragile chain of human effort. Watching flax seeds sown in a field and woad leaves coaxed into pigment was like watching history re-emerge. 

It wasn’t that long ago that women in our own families would have known these steps intimately. It’s really only since the industrial revolution that these skills have been taken away from the home. Spinning, dyeing, knitting, mending -  those skills lived in kitchens and gardens. My mother sewed as naturally as she cooked. My grandmother too. Further back, the rhythm of moving spindle and bubbling dye pot would have been woven through daily life. Only a few generations separate us from that world, and yet seeing it on screen felt almost miraculous, as though it belonged to another civilisation.

From Plant to Jeans

The film follows the journey in painstaking detail. After the flax is retted, scutched and combed, the fibres are silky and smooth - ready to become yarn. Then comes the spinning - slow, repetitive, strangely meditative. But again Justine showed that this is a skill that would have been practiced in almost every home and the knowledge and skill would have been passed down the matriarchal line. 

The yarn is dyed before it is woven, pale cones of yarn dipped into vats of woad pigment, lifted out green, and slowly, alchemically, almost magically, turning blue as it oxidises in the air. Watching those colours shift was mesmerising, like seeing a spell take hold. Once dyed, the yarn is finally ready to be stretched onto looms - undyed yarn for the warp and the dyed weft yarn woven together turned into cloth inch by inch. Only after all of this can jeans even begin to take shape.

And jeans, as the film reminds us, are not just two tubes of fabric stitched together. They are historically accurate in shape and styling with a one piece continuous fly, rivets and bar tacks, curved seams and pocket bags, belt loops and waistbands. They demand precision and expertise. Justine worked with denim maker Mohsin Sajid to shape the final garment, and even then, the finished pair is not “perfect” in the high street sense. They are uneven, handmade, a little raw. But they hold a beauty that no shop-bought pair could match, because every inch of them is story. They carry six hundred hours of work, yes, but also every failure, retry and breakthrough along the way.

Awe, Discomfort and Mourning

I must admit to feeling in awe watching it all unfold. To witness a plant become fibre, fibre become yarn, yarn change colour and become blue, that blue yarn become cloth, and cloth become jeans - it’s astonishing. Something so ordinary is in fact miraculous. 

But I also felt discomfort. If one pair of jeans takes this much labour when made carefully, sustainably and with consideration how can I look at the £30 pairs in shops without unease? The truth is, they’re only “cheap” because the real costs - the underpaid labour, the violated land, the polluted water -  are all carried invisibly, far away from us who wear and use them. This film highlights that cost making is visible.

There was humility too. The process wasn’t neat or romantic. Crops failed. Machines broke. Justine admitted to exhaustion, to doubt, to wondering if it was worth it. And still she persisted. That felt like the heart of it for me: creativity isn’t smooth. It’s patience, stubbornness, and the grace to keep going when it isn’t working.

And there was mourning. A quiet grief for the skills that once lived in families and communities. Skills that have slipped through our fingers in only a few decades. Watching Woman Grows Jeans felt like listening to a half-remembered song from childhood , both familiar and strange at once. I couldn’t help thinking how differently we’d all view clothing if spinning and dyeing and weaving were still part of everyday life. If we’d seen fibre change in our own hands, perhaps we’d never have arrived at the idea that clothes could be disposable.

We Can Choose What We Wear

When the film ended, I looked down at the jeans I was wearing and they felt heavy, full of hidden and untold stories. Woman Grows Jeans is more than a record of one woman’s project. It’s a reminder of how close we still are to a world where clothing was precious, where women kept families and households clothed with skill and patience, where every thread was valued. Watching Justine bring those practices back to life was unsettling and inspiring in equal measure.

These jeans are not just fabric. They are a whole host of questions spun in fibre and stitched into cloth. They ask us what we’ve lost, what we still might recover, and how we might choose to clothe ourselves differently in the future.

I would thoroughly recommend watching the film and you can do that this week OnDemand from Kinema. https://kinema.com/films/woman-grows-jeans-full-film-ccr2vy

You can also find out more about Justine and her work here https://naturalfabricdyeing.com/justine-aldersey-williams/

Enjoy and be provoked into action

Jules