From Field to Fibre — Where Our Purity Begins

There is a moment before the wearing. Before a piece finds its way to your skin, it has already made a journey — a field, a harvest, hands that worked it into thread. We believe you can feel the difference between a garment that has made this journey honestly, and one that has not.

So today, we tell you where our hemp comes from, what the plant itself does before it ever becomes fabric, and who is trusted with turning it into something you can wear.

A material, not a promise

Hemp has never been a marketing word at RootSQuaRe. It is the core fibre of everything we make — not because it reads well on a label, but because the plant itself does something few other fibres do: it gives back to the ground it grows from, rather than depleting it. Hemp requires little irrigation beyond natural rainfall in most growing regions, needs no synthetic pesticides to thrive, and its root system helps prevent soil erosion during the growing season. The stalk is then retted — left to soften through moisture and time — before the fibre is separated from the woody core and spun into thread. It is a slow process, closer to agriculture than to industry, and we have never tried to make it faster than it wants to be.

Independent research from the Stockholm Environment Institute (Cherrett et al., 2005) compared the ecological footprint of hemp, cotton, and polyester. Traditionally grown organic hemp required roughly 343 litres of water per kilogram of usable fibre — against nearly 9,758 litres for conventionally grown cotton. Hemp also came out more efficient in land use: 1.46 global hectares per tonne, against 2.17 to 3.57 for cotton, depending on cultivation method and region.

We tell you this not to condemn cotton, nor to elevate hemp to a miracle fibre — honesty also requires stating that hemp does not necessarily require less energy than cotton in processing into thread; on that point, the two fibres differ little, and in some scenarios cotton processing uses less. Purity, to us, means a figure is only shared once it holds, even when the truth is more nuanced than a slogan.

What the fibre carries

We do not dress the body. We carry it back toward its own frequency.

That belief sits at the centre of why hemp, and not something engineered to imitate it, forms the base of everything we make. An unprocessed, honest material asks nothing of the body it touches — no synthetic layer to adjust to, no coating between skin and fibre, nothing standing in the way of what was already there. We believe this matters. Not as a measurable claim, but as something we ask you to test only against your own experience of wearing it. Those who spend time in a Ritual piece often describe a stillness the body seems to recognise before the mind names it, as though the fabric were not adding anything at all, but simply stepping aside.

This is what we mean when we call a piece a threshold rather than a garment. It does not perform a transformation. It removes what usually stands between you and your own frequency — the noise, the synthetic layers, the disconnect — and lets you return to it.

The hands that weave it

Behind every metre of fabric stands a workshop. We work with HempSpring, a manufacturer with eighteen years of experience working hemp and other natural fibres, certified to GOTS, OEKO-TEX, and BSCI.

Each of these certifications answers a different question, and we think it is worth explaining what they actually verify, rather than letting three acronyms stand in for trust:

GOTS, the Global Organic Textile Standard, verifies the organic status of the fibre itself, from harvest through processing, and prohibits the use of toxic bleaches, heavy-metal dyes, and other harmful inputs along the way.

OEKO-TEX tests the finished fabric for the presence of substances known to be harmful to human health — a separate question from how the fibre was grown, and one that matters directly for what sits against your skin.

BSCI, the Business Social Compliance Initiative, audits the working conditions inside the facility itself: fair wages, safe environments, and the absence of forced or child labour.

Together, these three answer three separate questions — is the fibre clean, is the fabric safe, and are the people who made it treated fairly — and no single certification covers all three alone.

These are not badges we attach to our site to force conviction. They exist so that you do not have to take our word for it — a third party has looked, and confirmed. That is precisely why we tell you when you ask, and why we share it here, unprompted, in quiet.

What this means for what you wear

A threshold is not trusted because it is beautifully lit. It is trusted because what lies behind it holds up to closer scrutiny. This is as true for our materials as it is for everything we make: the story must be as pure as the fibre itself.