The clothes hanging in Lydia Wendt’s loft atelier in Los Angeles’ Fashion District shimmer in earthy tones: an orange sleep set dyed with California poppies, a coral lounge set colored with madder root, undyed tees in off-white cotton. Pointing to the dark disk of a dried sunflower, Wendt explains, “The Navajo used this to dye fabric black, and I’m trying to find a rich natural black.” Nearby, a dried indigo branch pinned to a white pegboard hints at her latest experiment, naturally dyed blue athletic wear. Across oversized worktables, swatches in shifting shades of lavender and plum suggest the studio is part dye lab, part textile archive, part manifesto.  Wendt, founder of California Cloth Foundry, is trying to build a fashion system that behaves more like a healthy ecosystem than a conventional apparel business. Her garments are made from American-grown fibers, dyed largely with plants instead of petrochemicals, and designed to be compostable at the end of their life cycle. Her goal is not to make clothing “less bad,” but to create what she calls regenerative fashion: garments that can ultimately return nutrients to the soil rather than accumulate as waste. The central premise of regenerative fashion is that textiles could function as biological nutrients instead of landfill waste. Credit: Michaela Haas “One solution while we’re trying to readjust our consumerism and our values around [overconsumption] is to create things that can go back to the earth without any detrimental effects,” she says. Founded in 2014, California Cloth Foundry is part of a broader reckoning with fashion’s environmental cost. The fashion industry produces more than 100 billion pieces of clothing every year, generating up to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and roughly 20 percent of global wastewater annually, with textile dyeing and treatment among the major culprits. Synthetic fibers derived from fossil fuels now dominate clothing production, contributing to microplastic pollution and mounting waste streams. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimates that the equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles is landfilled or incinerated every second. Against that backdrop, regenerative fashion has become a growing movement among designers, farmers and textile advocates seeking to reconnect clothing to soil health, human well-being and regional manufacturing.