Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 13, 1992 TAG: 9201130007
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: VALLI HERMAN LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Long
SALLY FOX DENIMS ORGANICALLY CORRECT
It's not the drought that's turning Sally Fox's cotton brown.It is nine years of research.
What started as Fox's gardening experiment has grown into a potentially huge change in the way cotton is grown and manufactured. Fox, 35, quit her job as an entomologist two years ago to devote herself to creating a commercially feasible variety of naturally colored cotton.
Convincing manufacturers and growers of the commercial feasibility of her discovery has been a long, difficult process that is far from over.
"When I was doing this I never had any help. I was almost desperate. I knew this was in my hands," she said in a telephone interview from her office.
After years of frustration and rejection, Fox finally has found a believer in her work. In December, the nation's oldest denim-jeans firm, Levi Strauss & Co., introduced Levi's Naturals, men's 550 relaxed silhouette jeans, jackets and shorts made from Fox Fibre, Fox's patented, naturally brown cotton that needs no dyeing or bleach to obtain its caramel color. The jeans sell for about $54.
These jeans won't fade like the billions of pairs of denims on bodies across the globe. The fabric gets darker with up to 30 launderings, a reaction Fox discovered when she boiled yarn made from the fiber.
A hand spinner by hobby, Fox started growing colored cotton on a small plot to find new fibers to spin and weave. Boiling sets the twist of hand-spun yarn and the changing color set her on a mission to find more plants and more colors with the unique property.
"I discovered that certain of my lines intensified incredibly when they were boiled," she said. Now Fox holds patents on the caramel color, called coyote brown, and a green, which Levi also plans to turn into jeans. She is about to perfect a deeper brown, which she has named buffalo brown, and she's working on more greens and, ultimately, a blue.
According to the center at Texas Tech University in Lubbock that tested Fox's fibers, chances aren't good that she will find a true, blue-jean blue.
"This project is somewhat in its infancy," said John Price, assistant director of the International Center for Textile Research and Development at Texas Tech.
"Who knows what it can expand to? It does look as if it is going to be confined to brown and green at the moment," Price said. "We've seen no strong purples or blues."
The center has yet to completely analyze the coloring properties of the cotton, but Price has a theory.
"The colors are derivative of lignin, the chemical which makes bark brown. You just don't see any blue trees, do you?"
Price said the cotton offers other commercial opportunities, but could pose color contamination problems at mills.
Evidently, Fox Fibre has hit a responsive nerve in the jeans-buying public. Scattered news reports about Levi's Naturals have sent consumers searching for places to buy the limited number of jeans, said Jill Novack, a spokeswoman with Levi Strauss.
"I think there is a real fascination with the fact that it is not dyed and that the color will deepen with washing," she said. The Levi's Only store in Columbus, Ohio, has been besieged with telephone-order requests for the jeans. A waiting list there is 18 pages long, Novack said.
Only eight stores in six cities, including Miller's Outpost at 8770 Pico Blvd., are slated to receive Levi's Naturals by early next month.
The jeans are in limited supply because the colored cotton supply is restricted. Fox and her contract farmers cannot afford to grow the crop on speculation. Levi holds an exclusive, multiyear contract for future crops, Novack said. Fox will plant more of the green cotton for use in Levis.
Colored cotton isn't new to the planet. Relatives of her cotton have grown in the wild for centuries, but weren't compatible with modern yarn-spinning machinery.
"These colors have been around. They were grown by Arcadian hand spinners and by Native Americans in Central and South America," she said.
Her plants, however, are the first with long, machine-spinable fibers that grow with a consistent color that intensifies with washing. Fox now continues her research and breeding programs on the 35-acre organically grown test plot.
California farming regulations prevent her from growing the cotton the way she wants to in the state, except for research purposes, Fox said. Farmers in Texas and Arizona planted 1,600 acres of Fox Fibre this season. About 10 percent of those plants were grown organically.
Fox was among the first farmers to grow cotton organically. Fox is in the process of becoming recognized by the California Certified Organic Farmers association in Santa Cruz.
After rejections by industry groups, Fox finally found support from Texas Tech University. There she was able to test her fiber's machine spinability.
The fiber also must be tested for its compatibility with a variety of chemicals, with dry cleaning agents, its reaction to stains and its potential to form other fabrics, such as knits, ticking, flannel and twills. The tests are expensive and Fox pays for them from selling her crops.
Few understood that her colors offer a cotton that is safer for the environment.
"It's really saving pollution at the dye plant," she said.
For the environmentally conscious, Price said, "It provides them with the possibility of wearing garments which have been produced with the bare minimum of chemicals or synthetic additives."
It is her hope that farmers will gradually convert to organic farming, which will further Fox's goal of creating an environmentally healthy cotton.
"The thrust of my business is to eventually reduce pesticide or go completely organic," Fox said. "All of my plants are bred without fertilizer or pesticide. If they do well under my conditions, they won't need all that other stuff."
Her cotton, and especially organically grown cotton, costs about three to five times more than standard white cotton. Yields are often lower, especially in the beginning. Some savings in production occur in skipping the bleaching and dyeing processes.
The work requires long and physically demanding hours.
During the harvest last week and for weeks before, Fox individually inspected several million cotton plants to judge the plants' color, fiber length, its position in her genetic program and the general health of the plant.
But the real question about colored cotton is, why does it get darker?
Fox isn't quite sure, but she suspects it has something to do with how the fiber is formed inside the seed. Layers of color-containing cellulose are formed on the fiber as it grows, much in the same way bark surrounds trees.
The warmth from washing seems to cause the color to seep into the fiber, adding color that won't run or bleed.