Linen: A True Natural Beauty

February 5, 2024

If you’ve ever wondered how linen gets from flax field to fabric or how nature plays a role in its wonderful nuances and natural colors, read on!

There’s a lot to love about linen, one of the oldest fabrics in the world, from its timeless aesthetic appeal in fashion and home decor to its zero waste production and circularity crucial for our planet’s future health. In today’s increasingly automated, artificially intelligent world, linen brings back a human touch in its hand-crafted traditions that span over 30 millennia and rely on old-world, artisanal knowledge steeped in rich cultural heritage. It’s a fascinating fabric, so take a deep dive with us as we explore linen’s natural beauty and answer “What’s linen’s natural color?” and “Are linen slubs imperfections?”

Where does linen come from?

Linen comes from flax, a flowering plant also known as linseed, that grows in temperate climates worldwide. Historically, flax has thrived in Western Europe’s ideal conditions – a temperate climate that optimizes alternation of sun and rain for a large and strong plant whose longer and stronger fibers create the highest quality linen. European flax is cultivated in a wide coastal band from Northern France into Belgium and the Netherlands. In 2022, 75% of all production of long flax fibers used to weave linen fabric for the textile industry came from France, but the eco-friendly crop is also produced by the key countries of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and China.

Why is linen considered a renewable resource?

Flax crops use low-impact production methods: they’re grown on rotation which helps preserve soil; require no irrigation, no defoliants and are GMO-free; the process to transform flax to fiber uses no additional water and all parts of the plant are used, resulting in zero waste. A renewed focus on textile circularity highlights linen’s recyclable and biodegradable benefits.

What is linen’s natural color?

The natural color of linen fabric is known as “linen gray”, but it’s not a standardized tone. Woven linen colors range from ivory to beige to oatmeal, and vary based on how each year’s flax crop is grown and processed. For example, the process to separate flax fiber from the plant is called retting, where the plant is left lying on the field for up to 6 weeks while the green stem dries out and turns woody and brown. The exact color of the resulting fibers depends on the amount of sun and rain during the retting process. The flax plant’s interaction with the sun, rain, and earth create the essence of linen’s natural beauty, an advantage prized by those in the textile industry.

Why doesn’t linen fabric have a uniform texture?

Linen’s made by spinning the long flax fibers into strong, durable yarns. As you can see in the cross-section of flax fiber below, it’s made up of irregular polygonal shapes – these nodes add to linen’s flexibility and texture. Therefore, linen yarns have a unique, irregular structure that’s more difficult to spin than a smooth yarn like cotton, creating a looser weave and the highly textured look that gives linen its charm.

These characteristics, especially “slubs” (varied swollen fibers occuring randomly along the fabric’s length) are not flaws or deficiencies; those in the decorative furnishing industry value them as part of linen’s natural aesthetic appeal.

How did the climate impact 2023’s flax crop and linen fabric production?

Flax is planted in the spring and harvested in September, so the crop’s outcome is highly dependent on how summer weather behaves. Mother Nature sowed chaos in key flax growing regions of Europe this year, especially northern France. Weather conditions flipped from drought during late May and early June when the flax needed rain to reproduce and grow, to excessively heavy summer rains in late July and August which made for a very wet retting process.