viscose: an interrogation

Silk sounds luxurious (my personal favourite fabric to wear, despite ongoing conversations between our design and sustainability teams around the animal welfare complexities). Linen gives ‘traipsing around Europe in summer’ vibes, or for that matter, the Byron hinterland. Cotton sounds wholesome and natural and gives ‘line-dried on a Hills Hoist’, or ‘smelling of lavender’ vibes.

Viscose? Less glamorous.

Maybe it’s because its not ‘technically’ a natural fibre, even though it is made from wood pulp. Whatever happened, it doesn’t quite have the romance of the others.

But here’s the thing: I love viscose.

It’s soft, takes print beautifully, has a gorgeous drape and can be super practical..

We’ve used viscose at Spell for years, because for certain garments it does something other fibres simply don’t. And our customers love it.

So, inspired by Izzy and Grace, I went down my own rabbit hole. Consider this less a defence of viscose and more…an interrogation.

First things first: what actually is viscose? And is it really made from wood pulp?

Viscose starts with cellulose, usually sourced from wood. Yep. Trees.

The wood is turned into pulp, the cellulose is dissolved and then regenerated into soft fibres that can be spun and woven into fabric. So it isn’t technically a “natural fibre” in the same way cotton or linen is, but it also isn’t a fossil-fuel-derived synthetic like polyester. It belongs to a category called regenerated cellulosic fibres.

Essentially: tree becomes dress.

And this is where Il Ike to use the phrase ‘not all viscose is created equal’. Where the wood comes from, how forests are managed and what happens during processing can vary considerably.

At Spell, that’s why we use LENZING™ ECOVERO™ viscose. It’s derived from certified or controlled wood sources and, according to Lenzing, its fibre production uses at least 50% less water and generates at least 50% lower carbon emissions than generic viscose.

No fibre is perfect. Cotton, silk, leather, synthetics: they all come with their own conversations, weighing up complex pros and cons. Rather than declaring one fibre “good” and another “bad”, we ask where something came from, how it was made and whether it’s actually the right fabric for the thing we’re trying to create.

Does the skirt fall properly? Does it skim rather than stand away from the body? Does a sleeve collapse softly at the wrist? What happens when she walks, when there’s a breeze, when she dances? And, perhaps less romantically, what happens when a busy mum needs to chuck it in the washing machine?

You can draw the most beautiful dress in the world, but ultimately the fabric decides how that dress lives and breathes (so to speak).

Viscose has this lovely weight without necessarily feeling heavy. It’s soft, takes colour brilliantly (very handy when you’ve built a brand around print), and can have an almost liquid fall against the body.

For the clothes we’ve always loved making at Spell: bias dresses, sweeping maxis, printed gowns you can wear barefoot, with boots, to dinner, to a festival, on holiday, that matters.

So I dug a little deeper…

The more I looked into this, the more I realised viscose has been quietly living inside the bohemian wardrobe for decades - often in the wardrobes of precisely the women we’ve been pinning to moodboards forever.

And then there’s Florence Welch, who might be the ultimate argument for judging clothes by how they flow. She has built an entire visual language around movement: gauzy Gucci gowns, antique lace, prairie dresses, capes and enormous sleeves that seem designed to be caught by the wind. Talking to Vogue about her stage clothes, Florence put it perfectly: “It’s about freedom of movement.”

I’m not suggesting those divine flowing gowns are viscose - most are likely silk or custom fabrications - but that’s almost beside the point. What we love about them is the way they float, fall and come alive on the body. Silk can do that exquisitely. So can a beautifully made viscose.

And then there’s Chloé.

This was the one I was most curious about. I went through the current collection hoping to prove my theory and mostly found… silk. Lots and lots of extremely beautiful silk, which, frankly, I would very happily (hungrily!) wear. But beautiful Chloé silk comes at a beautiful Chloé price, and for most of us, that makes it out of reach.

Go back through the archive and viscose appears within the house’s fabric vocabulary. Natacha Ramsay-Levi’s wonderfully bohemian Spring 2019 collection wandered through Ibiza and Morocco, what she described as “hippie modernism” and “New Age boho”, and included a silk-viscose textile woven into tiny pleats with a Persian-rug motif. And Chloé’s archives document a Pre-Fall 2018 dress in printed viscose, finished with tiny riveted mirrors and a lace-ribbon hem, using motifs reproduced from Chloé prints of the 1970s.

There’s something wonderfully circular about that: a fabric we’ve come to associate with inexpensive fashion sitting quite happily inside the vocabulary of one of fashion’s great bohemian houses.

Stella McCartney hasn’t just used viscose, she’s practically celebrated it. Her Autumn 2023 cape dress was made from 66% “forest-friendly viscose”, which Stella describes as FSC-certified, traceable and not sourced from ancient or endangered forests. She wrote of the collection: 

“I wanted to emphasise a love for trees and the British countryside, embodied in our forest-friendly viscose.”

And it isn’t only an archival or luxury-fashion story. Viscose is all over the contemporary bohemian wardrobe too. Faithfull the Brand calls its rayon-viscose a “beloved fabrication” for its dresses, while FARM Rio regularly uses LENZING™ ECOVERO™ viscose for those exuberant printed maxis, and Ulla Johnson has sent 100% viscose jersey down the runway.

There’s also a very practical reason we keep coming back to it: the eternal see-through problem. Our customers will know what we’re talking about, because its a line we’re always tight-rope-walking. And I admit sometimes we get it right, and sometimes we get it ‘I can see your knickers!’ wrong.

You know how it goes, you find the perfect featherweight cotton, but it’s completely sheer. We adore cotton at Spell, but there’s always a balancing act between getting something light and airy enough while still giving it enough substance to actually wear. 

The obvious answer is to line it, but sometimes that means taking a beautifully weightless summer dress and effectively putting another dress underneath it. Suddenly you’ve added bulk and heat and changed the way the whole thing falls.

Sometimes we absolutely want a sheer cotton voile, that transparency can be part of its beauty. In fact, Spelly has been known to literally sit down on set at a photoshoot and rip the lining out of a dress to get that ‘sheer’ light-shining-through effect. But sometimes we want a dress to feel just as light and fluid without being see- through, and without requiring lining. 

That’s another place viscose can be brilliant.

But perhaps comparing cotton and viscose misses the point. They simply do different jobs. A crisp cotton poplin is brilliant when you want shape; a voile is heavenly when you want air; an old cotton gauze has that wonderful rumpled softness. But if I’m designing a sweeping printed maxi and I want the skirt to drape rather than puff, we’re probably not reaching for poplin.

Which is really what I kept coming back to while writing this. We have a tendency to look at a care label and make a fairly instant judgement about quality: silk, lovely; linen, lovely; cotton, lovely; viscose… hmmm.

But the fibre name only tells you so much. There are extraordinary silks and very ordinary silks, beautiful cottons and terrible cottons. There’s generic viscose whose sourcing and processing deserve scrutiny, and there are better-traced cellulosic fibres made through more considered systems. 

Then there’s everything the label doesn’t tell you: how the fabric was woven, how the garment was cut, how it feels against your skin, how beautifully it moves and whether you actually want to wear it.

Because ultimately I want clothes that live a life: the dress that gets thrown into a suitcase, worn barefoot to lunch, dressed up at night, machine-washed when you get home and eventually, pulled out again next summer. 

Things that soften and become part of your wardrobe rather than feeling too precious to actually wear. If it does everything I want, today and tomorrow and 10 Summers from now, I’m probably not going to care very much whether the label says cotton, silk or viscose.

Which brings me back to Izzy and Grace scrolling The RealReal and the conversation that started this whole rabbit hole. Would I now look at a beautiful designer dress, see VISCOSE on the composition label and recoil?

Probably not. I’d want to touch it.

And if it falls beautifully, feels wonderful against my skin, catches the breeze when I walk and makes me want to wear it again and again, perhaps poor old viscose has simply had a branding problem all along.

~ Lizzy