Bert Wolfcarius was born into a family that grew apples and pears, but he has devoted his life to growing flax for linen — a profession he “fell in love with” after joining a summer harvest over two decades ago and marrying fourth-generation flax grower Angela Verhalle, whose family business, Verhalle Vlasbedrijf, he now leads as CEO.
“People say if you want to work in flax, you have to be born into it. More often than not, it is a family business. I’m a rare adoptee,” he says. “I like flax because flax tells me what to do. It tells me when to sow and when to harvest. It’s the relationship with flax and nature that makes my life what it is.”
Keen to reconnect fashion professionals with the people growing and making their clothes, more industry organisations, producers and brands are offering immersive field trips and studio tours.
I met Wolfcarius in June, when I joined a field trip to flax country organised by the Alliance for European Flax-Linen Hemp. The alliance has been running these trips for more than 10 years, bringing fashion insiders closer to raw materials production and extolling the virtues of linen as a preferred fibre for fashion brands pushing to be more sustainable.
Lately, they have added fervour. Climate target deadlines are quickly looming, and producers around the world are already grappling with the very present threat climate change poses to raw material supplies, linen included. Meanwhile, geopolitical instability and President Trump’s tariffs are throwing supply chains into chaos, adding a sharp edge to the nostalgic push for nearshoring and onshoring, as evidenced by our recent ‘Made in Italy’ and ‘Made in the UK’ series. In the European Union, these headwinds have materialised as a push for “strategic autonomy”, which linen stands to benefit from, as one of the few raw materials the region leads in.
France, Belgium and the Netherlands produce 75 per cent of the world’s long fibre flax, the type best suited to high-quality linen textiles. France leads the pack, accounting for 87 per cent of the 185,000 hectares growing flax in Europe in 2024 — a surface area that has seen 128 per cent growth in the past decade. But there are limitations to flax cultivation, namely that flax can only be grown on the same field every six to seven years, in between which it has to be rotated with other crops to replenish the soil; and, compared to other fibres, this is still a niche operation — flax fibres make up less than 0.5 per cent of the global fibre basket for textiles.
With climate change shifting production processes and redrawing the cultivation map, is linen ready for its moment in the sun?
Drumming up demand
The people processing flax say not a single speck is wasted. The long fibres are turned into textiles for garments and interiors, while shorter fibres can be used for coarser textiles, paper and insulation. The shives — the wooden core of the flax plant — can be repurposed into particle boards for construction, mulching for horticulture, animal bedding for agriculture, or used to produce energy.
But the alliance believes that fashion hasn’t fully woken up to the benefits of flax-linen, including its breathability, thermo-regulation, moisture absorption and biodegradability. “A few years ago, a lot of the big brands we spoke to were confused about the sustainability of flax-linen. Many overlooked it and didn’t identify it as a preferred fibre [in the push towards recycled and next-gen materials]. It wasn’t really on the radar of [non-profit] Textile Exchange, and some databases like the Higg Index didn’t show its environmental profile accurately,” says Marie Demaegdt, sustainability manager at the Alliance for European Flax-Linen Hemp.
To try and counter this, the alliance has been doubling down on its two certifications: Masters of Flax Fibre and Masters of Linen. In 2020, just a couple hundred flax-linen companies were certified; now, there are over 2,500. In tandem, it published an updated lifecycle assessment aligned with the EU’s Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) methodology, which hopes to help fashion corps recognise linen as a preferred fibre.
There is also the provincial image of flax-linen to contend with. Last October, while reporting our ‘Made in Italy’ series, I got a tour of the Kering Material Innovation Lab in Milan — the luxury conglomerate’s future-facing hub for researching and road-testing more sustainable materials. Director Christian Tubito explained that linen has been a tough sell to Kering’s roster of creative directors, despite its myriad environmental wins. The designers didn’t see it as elevated enough for their core ranges, so the lab was working to combine linen with more conventionally luxurious fibres like cashmere, cotton and silk.
That perception seems to be slowly shifting. According to a recent survey by fashion search engine Tagwalk, linen accounts for 5 per cent of the range offered by 60 leading luxury brands. While this figure has remained relatively stable since 2022, its application has undergone a notable transformation, elevating linen beyond just summer staples. “Linen is becoming more exclusive, more high quality, with a real change in the way it is used,” said Tagwalk founder Alexandra Van Houtte in the report, published in May 2025. “Designers are now working with it as a creative element in its own right, taking advantage of the material’s many innovations. They are broadening its uses, combining it with a more tailor-made and aesthetic look, with impressive work in terms of cut and finish.” This includes eveningwear at Ludovic de Saint Sernin and Jacquemus, formal tailoring at Bottega Veneta and Ralph Lauren, and more experimental styles at Issey Miyake and Schiaparelli.
How climate change is shifting flax production
Like hemp and jute, flax is a bast fibre, meaning the fibre is extracted from the outer layer of the plant rather than the leaf or the flower. The conventional production pattern for cultivating it is clearly defined.
In early March, the fields are ploughed in preparation for sowing. Fields are then sown between mid-March and mid-April, ideally early in the morning on a windless day. Seventy-five days later, farmers will see their flax fields bloom, with small, purplish blossoms appearing for mere hours, before dropping to the ground around lunchtime. A further 25 days later, the flax is ready to be harvested, at which point it is pulled from the ground — not cut — to extract the longest possible fibre. The flax is then laid down on the field for a process known as “retting”, where a combination of sunlight, rain and bacteria in the soil help to soften the flax and separate the fibre from the stalk over the course of about two months. After this, the flax is ready for breaking and scutching, where the flax goes through specialist machinery and is shaken to remove impurities and free the fibre. The remaining fibre is pulled through metal combs in a process called hackling, which removes the straw and cleans the fibres, giving a glossy sheen in preparation for spinning. The next stages — spinning, weaving and dyeing — are very similar to the process for wool.
All of this has been taken as gospel for generations, but climate change is forcing flax growers to rethink their approaches. Wolfcarius notes that flax growers depend on the Gulf Stream, a warm and swift Atlantic Ocean current that originates in the Gulf of Mexico, which is weakening — leading to more extreme weather. Temperatures are also rising. “When I was a small boy, 30°C was extreme — now, that happens 20 times a year. Every weather condition lasts longer. When it rains, it rains for a long time. When it’s dry, it’s dry for a long time,” says Wolfcarius.
In response, associations like the alliance are investing in research and development (R&D), trying to find more resilient flax varieties that can withstand the changing climate. One potential solution is winter flax, which is sown before the winter period, giving the flax time to develop deeper roots and provide access to moisture in periods of drought. Wolfcarius says Verhalle Vlasbedrijf now plants 50 per cent winter flax and 50 per cent spring flax, although the pay-off remains weather dependent. “2023 was a good year for winter flax because we didn’t have extreme cold and it wasn’t that wet,” he explains. “2024 was a bad year because it was freezing. It was like putting champagne in the freezer and forgetting about it — it just explodes. The flax roots burst and we lost some quality.”
These shifts could have wider implications, bringing forgotten flax hubs back into play and expanding flax production to new areas — or even countries — that were previously considered too cold or wet. “We are now looking at other regions like England and Scotland, where flax production was not possible 20 years ago,” says Wolfcarius. Indeed, Scotland’s Lauriston Farm planted its first small batch of linseed and fibre flax in May 2023, later expanding to three varieties of flax as part of a collaborative trial with the Soil Association and Edinburgh College of Art textiles teams. It’s part of a growing movement to bring flax cultivation back to the British Isles, which no longer partakes in commercial flax production.
In Northern Ireland, Mallon Linen founders Helen and Charlie Mallon are flying the same flag. The country’s capital, Belfast, was once known as “linenopolis”, but Northern Ireland hasn’t produced flax at a commercial scale since the 1950s, when it was offshored to France, Belgium and the Netherlands. The shift was closely linked to climate change: Northern Ireland’s weather doesn’t allow for field retting, so many local flax growers reverted to retting flax in specially constructed dams, which created toxic run-off that was damaging to local ecosystems. As a result, Irish flax fell out of favour.
Now, the artisanal flax growers at Mallon Linen have conjured up another solution: gathering rainwater in tanks adopted from old cheese factories and retting the flax within them, a process developed in collaboration with water stewardship organisation The Rivers Trust. “It wouldn’t work on a massive industrial scale, but at the scale we’re cultivating flax, the wastewater acts as a mild fertiliser when we spread the flax back on the fields,” says Helen. “We would need 60 times as much wastewater as we have for it to become a problem and overload the field with nutrients.”
Reviving the flax-linen ecosystem
Cultivating flax is not for the faint-hearted, says Wolfcarius. “In wheat, there are two figures: the price of the crop and the yield. In flax, you have the price, the yield and the quality, which can affect the price. Normally, when the quality is higher, the yield is higher, but you can lose a lot of money, too. It’s a story of two extremes.” To try and temper the highs and lows, the alliance offers membership fees proportional to each farmer’s yield, so a poor yield doesn’t hit them twice. “You don’t just start growing linen because the prices are high one year, you have to do it for at least five years, and you need a lot of knowledge and experience to do it well,” he adds.
Without the industrial scale ecosystem of mainland Europe to lean on, Mallon Linen has somewhat made it up along the way. Charlie and Helen grow three to four acres of linen each year on their 50-acre farm. Far from being the “rent-paying crop” it once was, flax-linen has proven a costly pet project, but one they are committed to getting right, not least because of the potential benefits to local biodiversity. “Northern Ireland mostly uses its land for grass and grass-fed livestock, so we desperately need crops that support pollinators and address the biodiversity crisis, which flax does,” says Helen.
They harvest by hand, attracting tourist volunteers to aid the process, which can take up to three weeks. “They used to say five good men could pull an acre of flax in a day. So in theory, our plot should take three days, but there’s a lot of chatting and craic, so it becomes a bit of a party,” she says. “This year, we’re scaling it into a harvest celebration. There are people coming from all over Ireland — at least 100.”
Not everything can be done by hand though. “We tried scutching by hand but that was a non-starter,” Helen continues. “My dad knew somebody who had some old equipment lying around that Charlie managed to put back together with new motors, which allows us to process 200 kilograms a day. Now, people with similar projects around the UK send us their flax to scutch — we’ve become part of a wider network.”
As yet, the supply chain is incomplete. Mallon Linen hasn’t found a scaled-up solution for spinning, but it has found some creative ways to sell the semi-finished product it has. Some of the longer linen fibre is passed on to Mario Sierra at Mourne Textiles, a local yarn producer that recently ran a crowdfunding campaign to revive Northern Ireland’s linen spinning infrastructure. In Scotland, Fantasy Fibre Mill is working to develop a suite of open source machinery for flax production, which would allow small farms to process textiles at a manageable scale. In the meantime, hand spinning hobbyists will buy some of the fibre, and others are experimenting with different uses: Mallon Linen sells some flax to Central Saint Martins designer Louise McArthur, who has used it for everything from fur alternatives in clothing to plastic-free hair for Barbie dolls.
Rather than trying to compete with commercial scale flax-linen in Europe and China, Mallon Linen sees its project evolving along more decentralised lines. “I would like to see people spinning and processing flax on their own farms at a scale that is sustainable and regenerative,” says Helen. “You have to be a bit radical to rebuild an industry.”
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