John Patrick

You've said that the Hudson River Valley, where you live, informs your work. How so?

It has really inspired me over the years, to think and wonder about the elements of nature, art, fantasy, and fashion. Some of my heroes are Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School of painting, and his most famous student, Fredrick Church. Church traveled to the Andes and painted some amazing paintings in South America. I sit here literally in the shadow of Church's home and think about my travels to the jungle in South America [where Patrick sources his textiles] and feel what a magical place the world is.

How did the John Patrick Organic collection start?

It started almost when I was a child, seeing and watching the countercultural revolution in the '60s. I don't think there was a performer more organic than Janis Joplin. The music, the painting, the food movement—I was raised macrobiotic. I also lived in a commune on the Hudson River in the early '70s for one summer. I lived with a man named Just Sprouts, and we washed sprouts, sold them at a food coop, and dumpster-dived. That was pretty radical back then, and we didn't call it dumpster diving. We called it 'going out to look for dinner.' What's more organic than getting the cheese that the health-food store threw out? Organic, recycling, it's all inspiration for Organic.

What would you say is the touchstone of your collection, so to speak?

When I first started to insist on certified organic fabrics as a standard, I couldn't find white shirting. It didn't exist. You can only do so much research and hear, 'No, we don't make it; no, we're not going to make it.' I knew a friend who was making sheets, organic bed sheets. I had about three minutes to make white shirts for a spring/summer collection. I sent my assistant and said, 'Go get the bed sheets. Wash them in peroxide and we'll cut samples out of them.' I didn't know if it would work, but the sheeting has become one of our staple fabrics. I launder it and we stitch it absolutely perfectly at 16 stitches per inch with beautiful flat or French seams and add these recycled horn buttons. The standard is probably 10 stitches per inch—actually, you're lucky if you get 10. Those are the kind of things that I'm really happy about—it doesn't matter if something takes a long time, that other people say, 'Oh, that just can't be done.' We spend four months making this fabric, there are literally thousands of stitches in the cloth, and then there's the stitching of the garment. I mean, these pieces are made with love. I can feel it when I look at them. We care about them, people are paid more than a fair wage and I'm able to go forward with good conscience that it's all ethically produced.

Can you tell us about how that stylish hand-stitched-looking label came about?

The first Organic logo I designed in Berlin in homage to the Sex Pistols. I cut out this punkish logo and had the logo woven into a label for the first collection, which I showed in Paris. It looked okay, it didn't even look like a label, so it was completely invisible. But I've spent years making things that are beautiful and invisible and I knew that I had to do something that was out of the box. I gave one of my embroiderers the label and said, 'Red is interesting.' Most of them came back horrible, but one of them was perfect.

Tell us about sourcing your materials in Peru.

I travel a lot back and forth to Peru, first of all, because it's a really fun place and it's got some of the best food on the planet, the people are really sweet, and it has about the twelfth largest organic cotton production in the world. I've been fortunate in that I've been able to meet a lot of the farmers, cooperatives, collectives, and learn about the different varieties of cotton. Some are better for knits, wovens, T-shirts, or to be spun into yarns, blended, turned into socks and so on. I first went there seven years ago. We met an archaeologist who was one of the first people in the world to discover color-grown cotton. It blew my mind to look and think, 'Cotton grows in purple? Cotton grows in green? What are you talking about? Are you pulling my leg? What kind of trick is this? Oh, you're making denim from blue corn, suuuuure.' The conversations became more fantastic, more interesting.

So you started because it was fun and now it's part of your life?

Yes. Part of my life is here in the Hudson River Valley and part is being in the jungle and having to check the grass for snakes to look at two acres of cotton. It feels like Crocodile Dundee sometimes. And yet, I've never felt more relaxed or safe or peaceful than I do in the jungle, and I so look forward to going back and to doing more work with the small farmers, whom I don't want to get lost in this organic explosion that's happening right now. The small farmers don't have a lot of guidance from the World Bank or whomever. They don't get to talk directly to the powers that be. They are part of an agrarian society, market-based farmers who grow cacao to make chocolate because it's their highest cash crop. They can't, of course, keep growing cacao every season over and over because it depletes the land. So, they rotate their crops. But cotton is not one of their favorite things to grow because the cotton buyers come during picking season and say, 'This cotton is rough. We're only using it to mix with something else. We'll give you 50 cents a kilo,' and it doesn't even pay for them to grow it. So what I've done with my team is guarantee them a specific price for their entire production. We're working on getting the farmers certification, so that even if we were to dry up and blow away, they can still sell their certified cotton to any buyer that comes along. These are little farmers. They don't have $800 to go and plunk down to some little piece of paper that's meaningless to them. I'm working now on getting an engineer to go and have training sessions about soil and composting and, yeah, you know, people might think, 'Composting—don't they do that in the jungle naturally?' But they don't necessarily and the farmers have asked us to send an engineer.

What do you make of this trend in organic?

I don't want it to just be a trend. I don't want it just to be something that's the green du jour. But the organic and green movement really resonates with young people and I think now that they've embraced something that means something to them, it has staying power. It's not just a trend.

Can you tell us a little about the flax field that you have in your front yard?

I ran into a friend who founded the Community Supported Agriculture Group in Claverack, New York, and this crazy, off-handed idea hit me, 'We should grow flax right here in the Hudson River Valley!' I spoke to an agricultural foundation and then thought, 'I'm just going to plant the flax myself. I'm going to get a tractor and crank up the land.' I went online, snooped out where to get the flaxseed. I found out that 80% of the world production of flax oil is grown in Canada. I figured if they can grow it in Canada, why can't we grow it in New York state? I found a man who invented a particleboard partially made out of flax that they make skateboards and furniture out of. I contacted him, and he's totally interested in buying flax that's grown in the Hudson River Valley. So, not only does it have potential for industrial use, home furnishings and clothing, but it can help struggling farmers in western and upstate New York. That's the reason I knocked myself out to plant this little flax field. Farming is not a glamorous business, so nobody wants to do it. Why would you want to have to live in the same place for 365 days a year? There's no going to St. Barts or Cancun if you have a farm. Farmers don't want to farm anymore because it's not worth their while to farm. We need to reverse that and embrace the craft.

Green clothing used to be crunchy. What changed?

One of the things, recently, has been the technology with color, both in botanical coloring—what people used to call natural dying or plant dying, which now you can do with lettuce and grains—all the way to the super-clean, super-performance fabrics that the Swiss are making.

What does green mean to you?

Green should mean honest. It should be truthful. Green should mean something that's ethical. I think that ethical is not just a word, ethical is a commitment. I don't want to hear that you think you're green just because you have a green light bulb.

Have you had any eco-conflicts as a couple, you and Walter?

When Walter found me, I said, 'No, I'm not going to a supermarket. We go to the food co-op.' When I first took him to the food co-op in Albany, New York, he almost left me because he couldn't believe how heavy the dogma was in a place like that. I go in there and they think that I'm a complete dilettante, that I'm not nearly as green as any of them, because those people are really green, like living-in-a-paper-bag green.