What Is Hemp Fabric, and Why Does Nepal Make the Best of It?

Hemp cloth comes from the stem, not the leaf or the flower. Inside the stalk is a woody core, and wrapped around that core is a layer of long fibres running the full height of the plant. Those fibres are the cloth. Everything else is firewood and compost.

That is why hemp is a fibre crop rather than anything else, and why the plants are grown crowded together. Crowded plants race each other upward, put their effort into height rather than branching, and produce long unbroken fibre. A hemp field grown for cloth looks nothing like a plant grown for any other purpose, and the Nepali hill farmer growing it has been doing so since long before anyone thought to regulate it.

Hemp asks for very little. It grows on hill terraces without irrigation, outcompetes weeds so it needs no herbicide, and is naturally pest resistant enough that it is rarely sprayed. On a slope where water has to be carried, a crop that does not need watering is not an environmental talking point, it is the reason the crop exists.

To get the fibre off the stalk you have to rot the glue that holds it on. That is retting. The cut stalks are left in a pond, a slow stream or simply out in the dew for a week or three, and bacteria eat the pectin binding the fibre bundles to the woody core. The weather decides how long it takes.

Retting is the step that separates good hemp from bad. Pull the stalks too early and the fibre will not come free cleanly, so you lose half of it breaking the rest loose. Leave them too long and the same bacteria start on the fibre itself, and the cloth that results is weak and lifeless. There is no instrument for this. Someone who has done it for thirty years walks down to the water, pulls a stalk, bends it, and knows.

After retting the stalks are dried, then beaten and scraped so the woody core shatters and falls away, which leaves a hank of long pale fibre that looks more like coarse blonde hair than anything you would call cloth.

The fibre is spun on a drop spindle, often while walking, and the resulting yarn is thicker and less even than anything a mill produces. That unevenness is the thing people mean when they say handwoven hemp has character. A slub in the yarn becomes a slub in the cloth, and it catches the light.

Weaving happens on a handloom, and in the hills that usually means a narrow loom. That is the single fact that explains the look of Nepali hemp: the cloth comes off in narrow bands, so the striped gheri pattern that runs through these bags is not a design decision but the shape of the machine. A weaver changes thread every few passes because a narrow band is what the loom can carry, and the pattern shifts accordingly.

Because the loom is narrow, a bag is assembled from panels rather than cut from a bolt. That is why the stripes on a hemp backpack rarely line up perfectly from the body to the side pocket. A factory would call that a fault. Here it is evidence of what made it.

A new hemp bag feels stiff, almost like canvas board. This surprises people who expected something more like linen. What they are feeling is the fibre bundles still holding together, and the first few weeks of use break them apart into finer and finer filaments.

This is the opposite of how most fabric ages. Cotton starts at its softest and slowly wears thin. Hemp starts at its roughest and softens for years while losing almost nothing in strength. A hemp bag that has been carried daily for five years is the one you want, not the one still in the shop.

It also behaves strangely when wet. Most natural fibres weaken as they absorb water. Hemp does the reverse and gains tensile strength, which is exactly why it was the rope and sail fibre of the age of sail, and why a hemp bag caught in Vancouver rain is in no danger at all.

Real handloom hemp is uneven, and you can see it. Hold the cloth to the light and the yarn should vary in thickness. The natural colour should be a warm greyish cream rather than a bright even white, because bleaching hemp to white costs it both colour and strength.

Be careful with the phrase hemp blend. Most of what is sold as hemp clothing is a blend with cotton, which is perfectly legitimate and makes a softer cloth, but the proportion matters and is often not stated. Our bags are hemp and cotton, and we say so on every listing rather than leaving it to the word hemp to imply something it does not.

One honest note about weight: hemp is heavier than it looks. A hemp daypack empty weighs noticeably more than a nylon one. That is the price of a bag that will outlast several nylon ones.