When roots become garments

Rootfull x Acien

Living grass roots, dyed with madder and woven into a dress. Not as a metaphor, but as a material reality. This is Acien's collaboration with Rootfull.

Silvia Acien has built a knitwear practice on plant-based fibres and regenerative principles. This collaboration with Rootfull takes that approach to its logical conclusion: rather than extracting from the earth to make textiles, the textile remains part of the earth itself.

Rootfull cultivated living grass roots that form the dress structure. These were dyed with madder, a plant-based pigment used for millennia, then held together using esparto grass woven with ancestral techniques from southern Spain.

The form is deliberate. Shaped like flower petals, the garment positions the human body as the stamen at the flower's heart. Nature embraces the body, rather than being shaped by it.

A garment made from materials that never leave the soil sets a clear precedent for how material production can function.

This same logic shapes our approach to packaging. Our materials are fully compostable; they return to soil as nutrients. You can grow food from them. The standard is straightforward: materials should nourish the next cycle, not interrupt it.

If a dress can be cultivated, dyed with plant matter, and held together with woven grass, then all manufactured goods can follow the same principle. Designed to feed systems, not deplete them.

Acien and Rootfull describe this work as part of "an ever-evolving library of regenerative textiles." This is material research that demonstrates circular systems are viable in practice, not merely in theory.

The piece positions the human as part of the plant, not separate from it. This shift,  from extraction to integration, is what regenerative design requires at its foundation.

The principle is consistent across applications: design from soil, for soil. Every object completes a cycle: from earth, through use, back to earth, enriched rather than contaminated.

This collaboration demonstrates what that principle looks like in practice. Living roots, natural dye, ancestral craft, and complete biodegradability. A garment that returns to where it began.

References: Silvia Acien, Zena Holloway

Banner image credit: Rootfull