From fiber to clothing: 365 days in the skin of a pants

Would the underwear of the future be several thousand years old?In ancient Egypt, linen loincloths called Chendjit;In the Middle Ages, in Europe, we wore bodies of body, still in linen.Today, the underwear made of vegetable linen fiber returns to the front of the French textile scene like a clothing that has the future.Natural, zero waste, compatible with local manufacturing, it has everything to rebuild a place in our dresses guards.Still, his life is not always a long, quiet river.To celebrate its first decade with us, the French briefs agreed to tell us the story of Liénor the linen panties, Nico the linen pants and Johnny the Boxer in Lin.The opportunity to discover their beginnings as small seeds planted in a field of Normandy until their end of career on the buttocks of their owners.

Like their future owners, Johnny, Nico and Aliénor were first seeds.Launched in the furrows of a field of Normandy in the middle of April, they form a very dense apple green field a few weeks later, with up to 2000 feet per square meter.All they need is sun and water.100 days later, in July, the shoots point to the end of their stem and flourish in a bluish flower.This is where the substantive marrow of a solid and durable underwear is made in the plant: flax fiber.Thanks to its exceptional mechanical properties, it can reach a meter in height with a diameter of only 3 millimeters in diameter.That is to say if it’s strong!During the summer, the leaves yellow and the flowers fade to make room for capsules containing new seeds.Plants are ready to be torn off to start their adventure in the textile world.

This is for conventional linen.But for Johnny, Nico and Aliénor - that the French briefs wanted more organic than organic - the task is Corsica."Put organic linen, that is to say without chemical treatment or fungicide, requires decades of improving cultivated varieties to make them naturally resistant to diseases", explains Paul Boyer, Director General of the Cooperative Company of producershemp and organic flax bending with whom the French panties work hand in hand."There is also a long -term job to carry out to set up the rotation of cultures which ensures biodiversity in time.Cultivate 1 hectare of linen, supposes to cultivate 7 hectares of organic crop in wheat, meadow or luzerne in the same rotation.It takes at least three years to set up such a production ”.But who says big constraints, also says big benefit: by imposing the implementation of a rotation of organic crops, the cultivation of organic linen encourages the production of organic wheat, and organic animal food, therefore organic milk and meatorganic.In short, choosing an organic linen brief has effects even in our plates!

It's harvest time.But there is no question of cutting the grass under the feet of Johnny, Aliénor and Nico: it is carefully that they must be torn from their native land.Because in the by-products of linen, nothing is lost and everything is transformed: the seeds are recovered for a next culture;The roots, fibrous, are exploited in the same way as the stems;The broken or too short parts are diverted to other outlets;The interior of the fiber - the anas - finds outlets in the production of mulch or agglomerated; and even the dust of the line.This is to say how much our wardrobe has distant cousins!

Torn off, the stems are placed on the ground, transforming the blue fields into long yellow and green streaks."And there, the Norman miracle occurs," continues Paul Boyer.The alternating rain-sun specific to Normandy creates a damp maceration called "routing" during which bacteria weaken the glue which signs the fiber bundles between them.The plant rod then turns into very thin fibers similar to rafia ”.In other words, the weather takes care of transforming the plant into a ribbon, which will become the future linen wire of Aliénor, Johnny and Nico.

But nature is sometimes capricious, and it happens that it smells the Roussi for Rely.When summer was too dry, the producers end up with piles of a coarse fiber on the arm.When it was too wet, they recover an irregular and too fragile fiber to be exploited on machines designed to treat long fibers."It's ungrateful, sighs Paul Boyer.We then see all his work transforming into a gray straw that is moving on the ground ”.It is more or less what happened in 2020 and 2021."Agriculture and nature sometimes take over and remind us that it is up to us to adapt to it and not the other way around, adds Léa Marie, production director at the French brief.When she says no it's no, and it pushes us to make strategies on the pursuit or not of a product line ".An observation which resonates in particular in the current period, marked by shortages and an outbreak of the costs of raw materials.

But when all is well, the linen has returned mechanically several times, rolled up and transported to large round balls of 400 kilos, then stored with farmers where the work of maturation ends.The longer it is, the more good the threads of our briefs will hold out!

Next comes the time of the point: a wide labor is mobilized to extract the long fiber from the flax, called the.Treaty in a factory turning 24 hours a day, the harvest of one year provides up to more than 12 months of work.Linen then goes to the "combing" stage to become ribbons, then that of the "wet spinning" - hot and laundry water - to create very regular strands.The latter are finally "loose", that is to say stretched to reach the desired finesse.Linen coils are ready to give birth to the tapes of fabrics that will compose Aliénor, Johnny and Nico.

In the 1970s, around fifty workshops wore flax on French soil.Since then, they have all closed."France is the first flax producer, but 90 % of the crops in the sector leave in China," explains Léa Marie.In French briefs, we have the opportunity to be able to make our linen slip into France, but it is a real challenge because the sector is reduced to the state of microcosm ".Among all the French spinners who left 20 years ago, the Safilin workshop has been back in eastern France since 2021.In the 90s, he relocated himself in Poland, swept by Asian competition.

On the workshop site, its president says: “The acceleration of globalization with a very strong rise in power of China, the abolition of quotas on imports in Europe of Chinese products which would flood the market with pricesof thread divided by 2 unfortunately led us to consider stopping the spinning plant in France whose last coil was spun in Sailly sur la Lys in 2005 ".It was the rise in sustainable fashion that convinced it to return to France.Today, only the wet spinning is still done in Belgium, but thanks to the joint action of the French Slip and several actors in the spinning in France, it will be back on the territory from 2022.Good news therefore, but also a big challenge because the know-how and knowledge of the machines was lost on the road to relocations and layoffs.

« Sur le lin, nous sommes en R&D permanente, continue Léa Marie.We co-construct our offer with French industry, we co-wrote our products with it ".In a continuous ping-pong game, French briefs teams and producers advance the sector.The former promotes a product idea, the latter raise technical problems;The former adapt their clothes to the machines, the latter invent and deploy new means."When we thought we were going to make a 100 % linen underfree, it was not won.But we went there all together in this delirium and we were growing up with each other ".

Slip in the making continues its growth in the workshops of making the last surviving hosiery on French soil.The Lemahieu Manufacture, a family SME born in 1947 of a knitting workshop on the garden background, now employs more than 120 employees in Saint-André-lez-Lille.Historical partner of the Slip, he shapes the strips of linen woven in magnificent underwear.

In this workshop labeled business of living heritage, linen wires are mechanically knitted on circular knitting trades.Before becoming underpants, boxing or panties, aliénor, Johnny and Nico take the form of a single tube of fabric one meter in diameter."The knitting technique is something magical," comments Paul Boyer.The buckles of the wires provide elasticity to a fiber which is naturally devoid of it.It is a very different process of weaving, which is the best known technique of flax treatment, and which makes much more steep tissues ".

The tubular part goes into dyeing, then enoblining: the fabric goes to the washing machine to tighten its stitch, stabilize it and color it.The tube is then open and stabilized by a passage under hot rolls that retract and stabilize its stitch.Aliénor, Johnny and Nico have changed from the Norman fields: they swapped their harsh skin for a soft, fluid and glossy fabric.In the workshop, the teams cut out the patronage parts in the fabric rolls, then assemble them with the machines corresponding to the desired type of seam."The workshop works in small islets of 7–8 people who run from one task to another to avoid musculoskeletal disorders and keep motivated staff," explains Léa Marie.Industrialists are very attentive to the well-being of employees because they know that it is due to recruit it ".

In the long term, the industry wonders about automation and its effects on the profession."I think that for the most painful professions, it will be necessary to go to cobotics, and automate certain tasks, confirms Léa Marie.But we have to keep hands behind the machines, they are simply irreplaceable ”.

Now well detached, Johnny, Aliénor and Nico leave to continue their lives in the middle of the dawn, in the logistics center of Logtex de Troyes.Aliénor, Johnny and Nico are checked there from every angle, packaged and shipped.At the same time, their future owners set their sights on their photo published on the French Slip website: the meeting will arrive."Package, the garment is packed and delivered in our Troyes warehouse where the goods will return quality control to verify that the product meets our expectations," explains Léa Marie.It is then integrated into deposit, then dispatched on the three distribution channels: web, retail and resellers ”.As a brand created on the web, the French Slip still achieves 60 to 70 % of its turnover there, which does not prevent it from having opened around twenty stores on French soil, and fromWork with dozens of resellers."Linen works well in terms of sales," says Léa Marie.Because of its success, the Johnny linen boxer has even passed in the permanent collection ».A success to moderate however with the quantity of work provided: Johnny as well as the other complex parts in terms of production sometimes ask the company to spend 70 % of its time on products generating less than 40 % of the figure.

To go to the end of the responsible approach, the French briefs will change its packaging in 2022: Ciao the cardboard box, hello the pouch in white craft recyclable.In these packaging, Johnny, Aliénor and Nico will be wrapped in Kraft type "Burda", the paper used by our grandmothers to make the bosses!

For the promotion of its products, the Made in France is also obvious: the shoot of linen products has thus been carried out in Etretat, in Normandy.Communication always, the brand ensures that its speech testifies to the attention paid to each stage of the making."We have adopted the expression" good to wear "as a nod to ready-to-wear, simply to show that we want to create products that are good for everyone," adds Clara Libert-Coat, Acquisition in charge of French Slip.Our purpose is to say that there is no interest in consuming 2000 times a tshirt that is tearing itself apart every two months ".

That's it, Johnny, Aliénor and Nico finally landed on the buttocks of their owners!The latter have enough to be proud: today, it is unusual to wrap faces made in France."Today, it is not uncommon for what we wear on the back crosses the borders, but it has never been the case before our time in the history of humanity, recalls Paul Boyer.In the past, there were only the rich traders who dressed with sappes from far away, otherwise it was the field next door and then that's all.But in our time how can we go out with dignity in the street with clothes produced in detestable materials and conditions?The garment is a packaging for a person, it must reflect the meaning they want to give itself ".

The sub-guest therefore spins happy days on an equally happy owner (at least of his pants).But if it is durable, the garment is not invincible.Handles of love that grow, part of legs in the air that degenerates ... and it happens that the brief cracks.In short, who says life of the panties also says death of the pants.Tomorrow, the brand may imagine embarking on a biodegradable pants, who knows?But by then, she has other battles to lead to the end of life of her products."The anti-winning law which prohibits the destruction of clothes will arrive soon in France, and we do not particularly want to wait for it to pass to start on the subject of recycling, specifies Léa Marie.We have long stored our products with small defects, in warehouses, and we are painting to get rid of it until we set up the SLIP platform in the right direction ".Launched in June, this second -hand clothing sales platform first offered the company's prototypes or defective parts, before opening, in early September, to the resale between individuals.The brand also explores other tracks such as recycling - tested on its cotton products - and clothes recorded.

For the moment, the linen of Johnny, Aliénor and Nico feels quite alone on the shelves of French briefs, more widely populated by French wool and organic or recycled cotton.To develop the offer, it is not the desire that is missing."But we come up against the reality of cultures and crops, to which we have no choice but to adapt," sighs Léa Marie."On organic linen, we have on one side a low stock due to bad years of harvesting and the difficulties of the covid, and on the other an increasingly strong craze," adds Paul Boyer.We are therefore in a state that approaches the shortage ".This work of anticipation, Léa Marie does it a year in advance for each new collection."If we tell ourselves that we want to make a linen boxer in 2023, you have to buy it and plant it in 2022. Alors un an avant, on se lance en R&D pour trouver les bons produits au bon prix ».

To expand its linen offer, the brand continues to try to move mountains.Until initiating discussion with French regions to develop new fields of flax."The profession of textile production has changed a lot in 10 years, laughs Léa Marie.Today, I find myself discussing with a whole bunch of players upstream of my skills, and even to speak climate, water network, and land pollution with farmers installed in the territory ".And for good reason: it is by working hand in hand that the players in the sector have managed to move so far."We cannot treat the customer with a super clothing without treating those who sold it, those who sewed it, those who have tinted it, those who knitted it, those who spun it, andThose who harvested it, cultivated and sown, sums up Paul Boyer.It is the quality of all the links in the sector makes the quality of the finished product, which is why we are a cooperative company of collective interest which favors not an actor but which maximizes collective interest for theset of the sector ».

As for the French briefs teams, when they are asked "why so much effort?", Léa Marie responds to the tac: "Because it is simply possible.We offer an exit door and a viable business model to the actors of the textile sector of our country.Our role is to say that if we work well, everything is achievable in France.We have shown it in the last decade, and we intend to perpetuate our successes in the next one ".