Fashion as Environmental Research: Material Culture and Climate

In the Eastern Cape of South Africa, among the amaXhosa communities of the former Transkei, a person’s relationship to the land is written on their body. The ingubo — the traditional blanket worn by amaXhosa people — is not merely a garment. Dyed with ochre extracted from local clay deposits, it is a material record of geological knowledge, ecological practice, and cultural identity that stretches back centuries. The so-called “Red Blanket People” (abantu babomvu) carry their landscape with them. Their clothing is, quite literally, made of the earth.

This is not a metaphor. The ochre pigments used to dye the ingubo are sourced from specific sites whose locations encode generations of geological knowledge. The processing techniques — grinding, mixing with animal fat, applying to fabric — represent accumulated material science. The wearing of the blanket signals social status, age, initiation stage, and clan affiliation. Every fold carries information. When we study what people wear, we study their relationship to the land.

Beadwork as Ecological Encoding

The informational density of Southern African material culture extends beyond textiles. Zulu and Xhosa beadwork traditions encode social and ecological information in colour, pattern, and composition. While the “love letter” interpretation of beadwork colour symbolism has been widely popularised, the ecological dimensions are less well documented. Certain colour combinations signal seasonal knowledge — when to plant, when to harvest, when to move livestock to higher ground. Beadwork patterns encode topographical information about river systems, grazing lands, and medicinal plant locations.

Hutchings et al.’s research on Zulu and Xhosa medicinal plant knowledge reveals the deep connections between material culture and ecological practice. The same communities that produce elaborate beadwork and textile traditions also maintain sophisticated pharmacological knowledge systems — knowledge of which plants treat which ailments, where those plants grow, and how their availability changes with seasons and environmental conditions. Material culture and medicinal knowledge are not separate domains; they are expressions of a single, integrated relationship with the landscape.

“Clothing is not what covers the body. It is what connects the body to the earth. Every dye, every fibre, every pattern is a sentence in a language written between people and place.”

Why This Matters Now

The urgency of reading material culture as environmental knowledge becomes starkly apparent when we consider the climate pressures facing Southern Africa. In April 2022, KwaZulu-Natal experienced catastrophic flooding that killed 436 people, displaced over 40,000, and caused an estimated R17 billion in damage. A World Weather Attribution study (2022) found that climate change had approximately doubled the likelihood of such an extreme rainfall event. The floods devastated coastal and riverine communities — many of them the same communities whose material culture traditions encode centuries of knowledge about water systems, flood patterns, and landscape resilience.

This is not a coincidence. The communities most affected by climate disruption are often those whose traditional knowledge systems contain the most sophisticated understanding of local environmental dynamics. When a Xhosa elder’s knowledge of ochre-bearing clay deposits is lost, what is lost is not just a cultural practice but an environmental monitoring system. When beadwork patterns that encode seasonal information are no longer produced, what disappears is not just an art form but a form of ecological literacy.

Reading the Material Record

Lesley Green’s Rock | Water | Life (2020) offers a framework for understanding these connections. Green argues that ecology and culture are not separate domains to be studied by different disciplines, but entangled realities that require integrated methods of inquiry. Her work on knowledge practices in Southern Africa demonstrates that indigenous communities do not distinguish between “environmental knowledge” and “cultural knowledge” — these are Western categories imposed on systems that understand the human and non-human as continuous.

Fashion research, in this light, becomes environmental research. To study the ingubo is to study soil chemistry. To analyse beadwork patterns is to map ecological knowledge. To document textile production is to record climate adaptation strategies. The material culture of Southern African communities is an archive of environmental knowledge that predates Western scientific methods by centuries — and that, in many cases, contains insights that Western environmental science is only now beginning to recognise.

The question is not whether traditional material culture contains ecological knowledge. It manifestly does. The question is whether we have the methodological humility and interdisciplinary imagination to read it — and whether we can do so in time for that knowledge to inform our responses to the environmental crises now bearing down on the communities that hold it.