Mimi Prober

Cross-sector partnerships are imperative for implementing sustainable business practices in the fashion industry. In her capacity as a board member of the Hudson Valley Textile Project, Mimi works with a consortium of universities, farms, mills, and manufacturers, to progress New York’s Fashion Innovation Center. The FIC reifies the New York Textile Act, passed by Governor Hochul, in order to strengthen New York’s sustainable animal and plant fiber industries. This initiative is at the forefront of the national textile sustainability movement. It endeavors to centralize the fashion supply chain and connect local fiber farmers with the fashion industry, at once stimulating the local fiber economy and encouraging sustainable design and production methods. It serves as a launching pad for research on textile processing, prototyping, and material characterization, and as a cradle for companies focusing on innovative uses of natural fibers. Additionally, appointed by New York State’s Commissioner of Agriculture and Markets, Mimi serves as a representative member with the Natural Fiber Textile Development Workgroup. This organization encourages stakeholders to invest in New York State’s natural fiber textile industry, create jobs in the sector, promote education on the benefits of natural fibers, and increase opportunities to promote these goods within and beyond the state. The Natural Fiber Textile Development Workgroup’s first call to action was a collaborative report, which identifies recommendations and actionable strategies to expand New York’s natural fiber industry. This includes capacity building and infrastructure, grant support for fiber processing, expanded educational programs for current and aspiring farmers, designers, and manufacturers, educational resources for consumers, and expanded collaborations across the supply chain. These strategies can carry the local natural fiber industry with the support of the entire manufacturing ecosystem to new heights. Mimi’s work with the Natural Fiber Textile Development Workgroup models sustainable growth for others in the fashion, home, and lifestyle space. Although much of her focus lies on her local community in New York, Mimi partners with community-engaged organizations and artisans throughout the United States and across the globe. She collaborates on traditional handmade bobbin lace for her ready-to-wear collections from a multi-generational lacemaker’s guild in Kollam, India. Supplying a market for artisanal goods maintains generational craft as a viable source of income, especially for women. This is just one way in which Mimi’s work preserves traditional crafts, which risk obsolescence with the proliferation of machine automation. Mimi’s penchant for antique textiles shines through in her work, which often features reclaimed handwork. Each garment label (or provenance source card) traces the garment’s lifespan and story in detail. For example, she describes the origin of a fragile coverlet, made into a jacket: handwoven on a large 19th century floor loom, signed and dated by the individual who originally wove the textile. Transforming this fragile artifact into something to be worn, cherished and mended by generations to come, she preserves not only the textile but the memory of the person who signed their handiwork, so long ago. In adherence with her slow fashion philosophy, Mimi uses quality local materials and implements closed loop, zero waste design methods. In partnership with farms and mills, she develops custom woven, knitted, and felted textiles, utilizing only natural fibers. These collaborations help to preserve disappearing crafts by spotlighting the time and skill they require and honoring the hands that make them. Automated knitting machines require extremely fine yarn, yet little infrastructure exists to spin wool so finely–a major impediment to local fiber farms whose product is often only marketable to hand knitters and the craft market. Mimi, alongside a local fiber mill, and an expert knitter, are working through this obstacle. Together, they are developing a custom local wool textile, based on an antique coverlet, on a computerized knitting machine. In partnership with Jeanne Carver of Shaniko Wool Company, Mimi produced a commemorative custom felted textile ensemble. Carver represented this collaboration when she wore the garments to be honored by the king for her contributions to his book “His Majesty at 75: The Leadership and Vision of King Charles III.” Collaborative textile development expands what’s possible in the local fiber-to-garment process and paves the way for future partnerships. By pressing, pounding, steaming, and steeping, Mimi derives a painterly palette of colors from sustainably sourced botanical materials. Her brand partners with local flower farms and florists to reclaim flowers that would otherwise be discarded, harvests local natural pigment, through foraging and farm partnerships, specifically integrating Japanese indigo grown at an Upstate New York farm within her collections, and uses food waste such as pomegranate skins and avocado pits and peels to create alternative natural dyes. These dye methods mitigate effluent water, support local community and environmental ecosystems, and pose a viable alternative to the toxic, synthetic dyes which permeate the fashion industry and global water supply. Through her capacity as a board member of the Hudson Valley Textile Project, Mimi also serves as the chair of the Northeast Botanical Dye Network, through which she seeks to expand agriculture and community in service of natural dye methodologies. Mimi’s thoughtful leadership and state legislative involvement enable designers, farmers, and mills, and others in the textile space, to more easily implement the same, slow fashion methods that are integral to her philosophy.