The Oldest Fabric in the World

Linen is the oldest textile known to humanity. Flax fibres found in a cave in Georgia were dated to 36,000 years ago — spun, twisted, and dyed by hands we will never know. The ancient Egyptians wrapped their pharaohs in it. Roman soldiers marched in it. Medieval European traders built fortunes on it. For most of human history, if you wore something, there was a very good chance it was linen.

The plant behind it is Linum usitatissimum — which translates, rather beautifully, as most useful. The flax plant grows quickly, requires very little water compared to cotton, and needs almost no pesticides. It is one of the most sustainable natural fibres on earth, and it has been for a very long time.

The process of turning flax into fabric is called retting — the cut stalks are soaked in water to loosen the woody outer layer, then dried, then broken and beaten until the long inner fibres are revealed. Those fibres are then combed, spun into thread, and woven into cloth. It is slow, deliberate work. It has not changed much in thousands of years. And that, perhaps, is the point.

In a world of fast fashion and synthetic fibres produced in factories at a scale that would horrify the women who once spun flax by hand — linen remains stubbornly, beautifully itself. It breathes in heat. It softens with every wash. It wrinkles, yes — but those wrinkles are the proof that it is real. That it was made from something that grew in the ground. That it has a story.

From Field to Fabric

Most people who wear linen have never seen a flax plant flower. It's worth pausing on that for a moment — because the gap between a field of small blue flowers swaying in a summer breeze and a perfectly cut linen shirt is one of the most remarkable journeys in all of textile making.

It begins in spring, when flax seeds go into the ground. The plant grows quickly — within a hundred days it reaches waist height, topped with delicate five-petalled flowers the colour of a clear sky. The flowers last only a single morning, falling by midday. Then the seed pods form, and the farmer watches the stems carefully. The flax is pulled — not cut, pulled — from the ground, roots and all, to preserve the full length of the fibre inside the stalk.

What happens next is called retting, and it is where patience becomes a professional requirement. The pulled stalks are laid in fields and exposed to dew, rain and morning mist for several weeks — a process called dew retting. Or they are submerged in slow-moving water — water retting — for a shorter but more controlled period. Either way, the goal is the same: to allow the natural bacteria to break down the woody outer casing of the stalk without damaging the long, strong fibres inside.

Those inner fibres — fine as silk, strong as wire — are what become linen.

Once retted and dried, the stalks go through a process called scutching — beaten and scraped to remove the remaining woody material. Then hackling — combed through metal pins to separate the long, smooth line fibres from the shorter, rougher tow fibres. The line fibres are spun into the fine thread that becomes the linen you feel against your skin. The tow becomes rope, paper, insulation. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is rushed.

The whole process, from seed to cloth, takes the better part of a year. In an era when a fast fashion t-shirt can go from design to shop floor in two weeks, that timeline feels almost radical.

A Fabric That Built Civilisations

The Egyptians called it "woven moonlight." They used it for everything — clothing for the living, shrouds for the dead, sails for their boats on the Nile. Linen was so valued in ancient Egypt that it served as currency. Priests wore only white linen, believing it represented purity. The finest grades were so sheer they were described as "woven air." When archaeologists unwrapped the mummies of pharaohs, it was linen they found — still intact, still recognisable, three thousand years later.

That durability is not an accident. Linen is one of the strongest natural fibres known — it actually gets stronger when wet, and it does not degrade easily. The ancient world understood something we are only now remembering: that slow, well-made things last.

The Greeks and Romans built their empires partly on linen. Roman legions wore linen undergarments beneath their armour. The great trading cities of medieval Europe — Bruges, Ghent, Reims — grew wealthy on the linen trade. Irish linen became world-famous in the 17th century, with Belfast at its centre, supplying fine cloth to the courts of Europe.

Even the word lingerie comes from the French linge — meaning linen. For most of human history, everything worn next to the skin was linen. Not because it was fashionable. Because it was the best thing available.

And then cotton arrived. Cheaper to produce, easier to spin at industrial scale, cotton swept through the textile world in the 18th and 19th centuries and linen retreated — not because it was inferior, but because the world had decided that faster and cheaper mattered more than better and slower.

Harakeke: The Plant That Clothed a Nation

Stand beside a river in Central Otago on a still morning and you will likely see it — long, arching green leaves fanning out from a central base, reaching chest height or taller, tough and purposeful against the landscape. Harakeke. New Zealand flax. It grows on riverbanks, in wetlands, along coastal margins, in gardens and on marae from Northland to Southland.

To most New Zealanders today it is simply part of the landscape — familiar, ever-present, unremarkable in the way that only truly essential things can be. But to Māori, harakeke was never unremarkable. It was taonga — treasure. And the knowledge of how to use it was among the most valued knowledge a person could hold.

Māori weavers understood harakeke with an intimacy that took generations to develop. They knew which part of the plant to harvest and which to leave — the central shoot, the rito, was never cut, for it represented the child at the heart of the family. They knew how to strip the leaves, how to soften the fibre, how to prepare it for weaving.

From harakeke they made kete — baskets of every size and function. They made mats, cordage, and fishing nets. They made kākahu — cloaks — some of them so fine and so intricately worked that they represented hundreds of hours of skilled labour and carried deep spiritual significance. The finest cloaks, incorporating feathers and worked with complex geometric patterns, were among the most treasured possessions a rangatira could own.

When European sailors first encountered these garments in the late 18th century, they were astonished. Joseph Banks, the botanist on Cook's first voyage, wrote admiringly of the quality of Māori flax weaving. He saw immediately that the fibre had commercial potential. He was right. Within decades of European settlement, harakeke had become one of New Zealand's most significant export commodities. At its peak in 1916, New Zealand was exporting 32,000 tonnes of harakeke fibre annually — into ropes that rigged ships across the world, sacking that carried grain, and wool packs that built South Island fortunes.

The Great Flax Confusion

"Why do you buy European linen when we have our own flax?" It is the most common question Tania hears in the Lohi Linen store. And it is a completely reasonable question — because the word "flax" in New Zealand carries an image so strong and so specific that it is almost impossible not to ask it.

The image is harakeke. Those long green leaves. That familiar riverside plant. That plant and the European flax plant that produces linen are about as closely related as a cabbage and a kauri tree. They share a name because the first European settlers in New Zealand saw Māori weaving beautiful cloth from harakeke — cloth that reminded them of the linen woven from flax back home — and they called it what they knew. New Zealand flax. The name stuck, passed into common usage, and has caused confusion ever since.

Here is the difference:

They are both remarkable plants. They both have extraordinary histories in this country. But they are not the same thing, and they cannot do the same job.

When New Zealand Answered the Call

In the northern summer of 1939, as German tanks rolled across Poland and the lights went out across Europe, a quiet crisis was developing in the textile world that would reach all the way to the farms of New Zealand's South Island. Britain needed linen. Urgently. Desperately. In quantities that peacetime supply chains could never have imagined.

Not just for uniforms and bandages, though it needed those too. Linen fabric — strong, lightweight, able to be treated and stretched taut — was a critical material in the construction of military aircraft. The fabric that covered the wings and fuselages of Spitfires, Hurricanes and countless other aircraft came from flax fields. Without linen, Britain could not build the aircraft it needed to survive.

For centuries, the finest linen in the world had come from Belgium and the Netherlands. By 1938, Russia had placed an embargo on all its exports. When the German army swept through the Low Countries in May 1940, it cut off the world's linen supply. Britain turned to its Commonwealth. The call went out — to Australia, to Canada, to New Zealand. We need flax. True flax. Linen flax. Grow it, process it, send it. New Zealand said yes.

In 1939 the British government offered to finance a linen flax industry in New Zealand on the condition that 6,000 hectares were planted and processed. Before the first harvest was even in the ground, the request came back from Britain with a single urgent instruction: increase the area to the uttermost limit.

What followed was one of the most remarkable industrial mobilisations in New Zealand history — and almost no one knows about it today. Farmers who had never seen a linen flax plant were persuaded to grow it. Agricultural machinery was redesigned and manufactured under wartime urgency. Seventeen processing factories were constructed across the South Island — all built in months rather than years, in Marlborough, Canterbury, Otago and Southland. Women who had never worked in a factory before operated the processing machinery while the men went to war.

Central Otago was part of this effort. The region that is now home to Lohi Linen contributed to a wartime industry that sent its fibre halfway around the world to cover the wings of aircraft fighting over occupied Europe. Between 1941 and 1948, more than 10,000 tonnes of linen fibre were exported from the South Island alone.

After the war the industry did not disappear immediately. Government subsidies kept it alive through the 1950s and into the 1960s. But when the government removed its protections in the 1970s the New Zealand linen industry could not survive. The last linen processing plant in New Zealand closed in 1985. The factories came down. The fields returned to grass. The women who had worked those machines grew old and the story they carried faded from public memory almost entirely.

But it happened. In the South Island. In Otago. In the same landscape where Tania cuts linen by hand today.

The Right Fabric in the Right Place

There is a particular kind of Central Otago day that people who have never been here find hard to imagine. It begins cold. Properly cold — the kind of cold that comes off the Hawkdun Range in the early morning and finds its way through every gap in every layer you are wearing. By ten o'clock the sun is up and the temperature is climbing. By early afternoon it is genuinely hot — the schist rocks holding the heat, the tussock dry and golden, the sky an unbroken blue that seems to go on forever. By evening the temperature drops again, fast and decisive. In a single Central Otago day you can experience four seasons.

This raises a practical question that every person who visits Central Otago eventually confronts: what on earth do you wear? The answer, it turns out, is linen.

Linen is the only natural fabric that genuinely performs across temperature extremes. The structure of the linen fibre — hollow at the core, with a natural wicking action — means it draws moisture away from the skin and allows air to circulate freely. On a hot Central Otago afternoon, linen breathes when nothing else does. Cotton holds moisture against the skin. Synthetic fibres trap heat. Linen moves air.

But linen also provides surprising warmth when layered. The same fibre structure that makes it cool in heat provides insulation in cold. A linen shirt under a jacket on a cold Central Otago morning does something a cotton shirt cannot — it regulates, rather than simply insulates.

And then there is the sun. Central Otago sits at high altitude with some of the highest UV levels in the Southern Hemisphere. The dense weave of quality linen blocks a significant percentage of UV radiation while still allowing air to circulate.

There is one more quality of linen that matters particularly here. Linen gets better. Not just with age in a general sense — but specifically, tangibly, wash by wash, wear by wear. The fibres soften with use. The cloth becomes more supple, more comfortable, more itself. A linen shirt that has been worn and washed fifty times is a fundamentally different garment from the one that came off the cutting table — more beautiful, more personal, more alive. In a place like Central Otago, where people tend to live practically and keep things that work, that quality matters enormously.

The Shed That Started Everything

Tania Haigh grew up visiting a farmer in Naseby. While her sister headed for the miniature horses outside, Tania disappeared into a shed. Inside that shed was one of the most extraordinary private collections of haute couture fashion ever assembled in the Southern Hemisphere — hundreds of garments from the great fashion houses of the 1970s and 80s, gathered by a quiet, paradoxical Māniatoto farmer who drove his tractor during the week and attended fashion shows on the weekend. The farmer's name was Eden Hore. And what Tania saw in that shed stayed with her for the rest of her life.

Eden Hore was not what anyone expected. He was a sheep and cattle farmer from Glenshee Station near Naseby — a weathered man of the high country who wore work boots and drove dusty roads. He was also one of the most sophisticated fashion collectors in the Southern Hemisphere. Vinka Lucas, Kevin Berkahn, Colin Cole, Jo Dunlap and Pat Hewitt. The labels in Eden's collection read like the history of 20th century New Zealand fashion.

For a child from Central Otago, stepping into that shed was like stepping through a door into another world entirely. The colours. The construction. The sheer improbability of it all — that garments of this quality and this history existed here, in the Māniatoto, in a farming shed at the end of a gravel road. It was the first time Tania understood that fashion could be more than clothing. That it could carry meaning, history, and a kind of quiet defiance.

She never forgot it. Decades passed. Tania built a life, learned her craft, developed the skills that would eventually find their expression in linen cut by hand in small runs. The memory of Eden Hore's shed remained — not as nostalgia, but as a compass.

When the opportunity came to return to Central Otago and open Lohi Linen on Charlemont Street in Ranfurly, Eden Hore was part of the reason she came back. Today two of his garments sit in specially designed display pods inside the Lohi Linen store — part of a regional exhibition trail that is bringing his nationally significant collection out of the museum and into the places he loved. The Central Otago District Council purchased the 276-piece collection in 2013.

Lohi Linen is not trying to be Eden Hore. Tania's linen tops and pants and shirts are a long way from Parisian haute couture — deliberately, joyfully so. They are made to be worn, washed, lived in, softened by use. They are made from deadstock fabric — cloth that already existed, rescued from surplus rather than newly produced. They are made in small runs, never mass produced, always by hand.

But the conviction behind them — the belief that where you are does not limit what you can make, that slow and careful and considered will always outlast fast and cheap and careless — that came from a shed in Naseby.

This book began with the oldest fabric in the world — linen, worn by pharaohs and Roman soldiers and medieval traders and wartime factory workers in the South Island of New Zealand. It ends in a small workshop on Charlemont Street in Ranfurly, where Tania cuts that same fabric by hand, one piece at a time, in the landscape she came home to.

Tania Haigh

Tania Haigh is a linen maker based in Ranfurly, Central Otago. She is the founder of Lohi Linen, where she designs and cuts every garment by hand in a small studio on Charlemont Street — one piece at a time, in the landscape she came home to.

She has been working with fabric for most of her life. She believes linen is the most honest cloth in the world, and that the best things are always worth waiting for.

From Flax to Fabric is her first book.
ISBN 978-0-473-78985-5 (Paperback) · ISBN 978-0-473-78986-2 (PDF)