Letters to the Editor
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Bamboo vs. Hemp
There's another natural fabric out there- one that requires about 1/3 the water of cotton to grow; faces no natural pests comparable to the devastating boll weevil; is simultaneously more breathable and at least twice as durable as cotton- hemp.
In the early 1990s, I was once able to buy 50/50 hemp/cotton jeans, made in Romania, that were cut pretty much indistinguishable from cotton Levis- except that they broke in easier, were more comfortable, and lasted 3 times as long. Their weak spot was the thin pockets, evidently made of 100% cotton, that wore through long before the rest of the material wore out.
Those jeans were a blend, but 100% hemp can be woven as fine as linen. Its potential as a fabric has never been realized.
As "fashion", cannabis hemp was pushed into the "hoodlum youth" market by the mid-1990s, as part of the ongoing hoodlumization of cannabis/marijuana "weed" that's been so inevitable as a part of its mystifying illegal status. Now it seems to have gone the way of many another fashion fad- especially since the cultivation of cannabis hemp remains illegal in the USA. So, it's back to 100% King Cotton, which has always been much more comfortably capitalized as a crop- as well as drinking much of the American West dry, for its irrigation, and requiring saturation doses of pesticide.
Personally, I couldn't care less about fashion trendiness. I just want some eco-friendly, durable, breathable clothes to wear. Which marks me as one of the dreaded "hippie movement", I suppose.