Regenerative Fashion with Acien
Acien epitomizes a shift in the fashion industry toward more sustainable practices. The London-based label places artistic design within a circular paradigm, one in which negative impact is not just minimized, but regenerative solutions are emphasized.
Acien’s Regenerative Folklore Project for Vogue Portugal, Look 3: Pereta. Shot by Pierfrancesco Artini. Photo available via IG @acienofficial. ©All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
Exploring Acien’s lookbook on their site is transportive, otherworldly even, and this is in fact the idea. Their approach is informed by a “more-than-human perspective.” Their conscious luxury fashion pieces make no use of leather, fur, exotic skins, or glue with animal ingredients. In a collab with Tree Nation, a tree is planted with each purchase, showing an effort to restore environments beyond their design work. They use fully fashioning techniques, generating no offcuts of their yarns or fabric.
Acien makes clear their commitments to regeneration from start to finish of their garments’ lifecycles. From the start, the pieces are dyed with plant-based dyes, and the capsule collections use bacterial dying, a cutting-edge method that uses 6x less water than standard synthetic methods. The uniqueness of the embroidery is not just thanks to local craftspeople and production, but also to its crafting from invasive species hand-cut by Acien in the south of Spain.
At the end of their life cycle, Acien garments are crafted to enrich the soil, completing the goal of circular regeneration. Conventional fashion practices too often follow a linear process, ending with the garment as waste. With the aim of pulling carbon back into the earth, the idea of soil regeneration is crucial in the realm of climate solutions. Within their whole process, Acien uses fully traceable materials and guarantees transparency throughout the supply chain. These environmentally mindful endeavors extend beyond their designs, also offering services like garment rentals and master classes. Through these and others like panel talks, commissions, and consultancy, Acien demonstrates their understanding of education’s role in sharing their practices and inspiring others to follow suit in their own lives.
Acien’s Menigilda Project. Photo available via Acien. ©All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
The founder, Silvia Acién, is a Spanish Andalusian designer who uses her youth in rural Spain and her grandmother’s teachings as the backdrop for which she learned to deeply appreciate and observe her surroundings. She grew up on her parents’ farm where she nurtured a love for nature and a profound respect in working with it. She pursued her BA degree in knitwear at Central Saint Martins in London and graduated in 2023. During her degree she made clear her passion for regenerative luxury fashion, winning the Maison/0 x LVMH Green Trail Award for her Regenerative Folklore project, a project made from Nettle and Pineapple certified organic yarns that were hand-dyed with natural dyes sourced from bacteria and invasive plants. The project is beautifully eccentric, honoring her Andalusian heritage and acting as a symbol for her connection to the earth, her ancestors, and her community.
Since then, she’s continued to gain recognition, showing her work at London Fashion Week, Dutch Design Week, The Future Fabric Expo, and having been in a number of high profile magazines like Vogue, Vanity Fair, El País, etc. Central to her identity, and woven into her designs, is a reverence for nature and a commitment to its regeneration.
Acien’s Regenerative Folklore Project. Photography by Yanxin Ma. Photos available via Talking Textiles Mag. ©All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
Even as the idea of sustainability is steadily working its way into the fashion industry at large, it can be slow moving in the mainstream. It’s more widely known now that the production, consumption, and discarding of textiles is a severe stressor on the environment, and the call for transformative measures towards sustainable practices is more urgent than ever.
An emergent response to that call is the concept of regeneration that we see in a brand like Acien. Where sustainability aspires for carbon neutral impact, regeneration aims for the positive. In other words, sustainable fashion focuses on preserving existing resources, and regeneration takes a step further and works to enhance and restore those resources.
We’ve seen many brands make partial changes to their chain of production, benefitting from the marketability of their greener choices, but not actually being able to substantiate their claims. There is an entire lifecycle of clothing; far too often brands choose but one portion of this to ‘clean up,’ hoping that consumers are appeased and as a result not call them out on their lack of transparency for the other 90%. Progressing towards more sustainable fashion requires attention to far more than just materials used in clothing or packaging: it has to do with water usage, labor, carbon emissions, etc.
What could set Acien apart from other brands that advocate for sustainable fashion is the way that regeneration was woven into its ethos from its conception. Rather than approaching it as an afterthought or a way to jump on the greenwashing bandwagon, Acien was created with these practices in mind and continues to develop with them at the core. It won’t be easy to turn the tide in a massive industry toward sustainability, or even circularity, but a designer like Silvia Acién could shine as a light in the right direction.
