A new documentary premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival follows Isabella Rossellini, Donna Karan, and Mimi Prober as they make the case for a fashion supply chain that begins and ends in New York State.
Most people, if asked, couldn’t say within a thousand miles where the wool in their sweater was born. A sheep, sure; but which country, state, which breed, which pasture. Isabella Rossellini could tell you, because the sheep in question is named after a female artist and lives on her 28-acre farm in Brookhaven, Long Island, where rare breeds like the Lincoln, Santa Cruz, and Jacob are preserved with the same care most people reserve for heirlooms.
That impulse — to trace clothing back to the animal, the soil, the artisan who touched it — is the subject of Farm to Fashion, a 23-minute short documentary directed by Oliver Halfin and produced by Kelly Cutrone of People’s Revolution, premiering at the 25th annual Tribeca Film Festival on June 13. The film features Rossellini alongside designer Donna Karan and Mimi Prober, a New York-based designer whose entire label is built on what she calls a “farm to fiber” ethos; local farms, heritage mills, and botanical dyes, the whole chain that most of the industry abandoned decades ago in favor of offshore manufacturing and synthetic shortcuts.
The movement behind the film
The backdrop is a growing, well-funded regional effort. New York State has committed $10 million to the New York Fashion Innovation Center (NYFIC), a consortium headquartered at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, with a mandate to rebuild a textile supply chain rooted in the state’s own farms, mills, and makers. Made X Hudson, the Hudson Valley-based small-batch garment factory that is a member of the NYFIC consortium and a participant in the film, sits at the working end of that infrastructure; the place where fiber actually becomes a garment.
Prober has been doing this before it had a name. Her atelier’s development process, she has written, “invests in the supply chain at all points with farms, mills, and processors,” a practice that puts her in direct relationship with upstate New York growers of Cormo, Merino, Northeast Heritage Wool, and Japanese Indigo — the last of which she grows at a farm in the Hudson Valley. She currently serves on the New York State Department of Agriculture’s Natural Fiber Textile Development Workgroup, an appointment that would have seemed improbable in a fashion context a decade ago.
Rossellini came at it differently. Mama Farm began as an act of conservation; when she learned that a museum restoring an old tapestry couldn’t source the original wool because the breed had gone extinct, she began raising heritage sheep on Long Island. The farm now partners with the Parsons School of Design on a residency program that places graduate students among the flock, and the wool — sheared, processed, and woven entirely within New York State — has since appeared in collections sold at Moda Operandi. Biodiversity and breed preservation are the farm’s stated goals; the by-product is fashion with a provenance most labels can’t claim.
Farm to Fashion screens at the Shorts Theater at Spring Studios on June 13 and at Village East by Angelika on June 14, both as part of the Shorts: Fierce Fashion program.
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