Our Cotton models
Natural materials

Cotton has played a major role in the world's economic history over the last 200 years. The cultivation and processing of cotton was one of the causes of the opposition between the southern and northern states of the USA, which led to the American Civil War. The United Kingdom, for its part, developed its cotton industry by ruining Indian industry - which would later enable it to conquer an impoverished and weakened India. Subsequently, the development of the cotton industry in countries where this plant grows (with easy access to raw materials and cheap labor), led to the decline of the entire European industry.

Cotton, which has been cultivated for over 5,000 years in Egypt, is the world's most widely used natural fiber (30 million tons per year), ahead of wool and jute.

Growing cotton requires a lot of time, sun and water. The plant needs 120 days of watering to grow, before needing dry weather at the end of the vegetative cycle. These climatic conditions are found in tropical and subtropical zones.

To avoid annual variations in rainfall, farmers resort to irrigation (it is estimated that 40% of cotton crops worldwide are irrigated). Cotton is the world's 3rd largest consumer of irrigation water. It takes between 5,400 and 19,000 liters of water to produce 1kg of cotton, compared with 1,650 liters for 1kg of wheat and 3,700 liters for 1kg of rice. Water is an increasingly scarce resource, and shortages are already being experienced in many cotton-growing countries. Not to mention the social controversies surrounding cotton: one garment in five is said to come from a Uyghur forced-labor camp in China.

Faced with this situation, the industry is organizing itself to offer less polluting and more socially responsible alternatives. If we can't source a local fiber (cotton doesn't grow in Europe, except in certain very localized areas of Spain and Greece, and in extremely small quantities), we offer articles made from GOTS-certified cotton, meaning that their cultivation follows environmentally-friendly production and transformation processes, while respecting and continually improving the working conditions of the growers. Hazardous inputs are banned, such as toxic heavy metals, aromatic solvents, etc. The GOTS standard has become a benchmark in the textile industry, guaranteeing traceability throughout the value chain.