I'll be honest — Hemp wasn't on my radar when I first started thinking about what tabi socks could be made from. It's not on many people's radar in the fashion industry from what I've observed.
The consideration of Hemp arrived through a conversation with the factory in Nara I work with — Sugiyama Knit Kogyo, a family-run workshop that has been making tabi and five-toe socks since 1965. They'd been to a textile exhibition. They'd come across hemp. And in the way that quietly curious craftspeople sometimes do, they decided to experiment with it, and never looked back.
When they told me about it, I started reading. And the more I read, the more I found myself thinking: why isn't this everywhere? How did something so quietly remarkable end up so overlooked?
I was deep in the world of wool blends and cotton, trying to understand what makes a sock worth caring about. Not as a trend or a buzzword, but as a fibre with a genuinely interesting story.
This post isn't a sales pitch for anything. We haven't even launched our hemp collection yet! But I've been spending a lot of time researching this material and learning about the people who make things from it as well as it's history.
I wanted to share what I've found. Because I think hemp deserves more than a passing mention on a label.
What actually is Hemp?
Hemp is a variety of the Cannabis sativa plant, and yes — that's the same species as marijuana. It's also where most of the confusion and stigma comes from.
Industrial hemp contains almost no THC (the psychoactive compound), and it's been cultivated for thousands of years as a purely practical, utilitarian fibre.
The bit we care about in textiles is the long bast fibre found in the plant's stalk — fine, strong strands that can be spun into yarn, woven into fabric, or blended with other fibres like cotton.
In texture, pure hemp fabric is often compared to linen: crisp and slightly structured when new, softening beautifully with every wash.
Blended with cotton, it takes on a warmer, more familiar hand feel while keeping the best properties of both fibres.
Hemp in Japan: a history older than you might expect
Before I go into what hemp does as a material, I want to say something about where it comes from — specifically in Japan, which matters a great deal to what we're building at Tabi Co.
Hemp has been cultivated in Japan since the Jōmon period, somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, making it one of the earliest cultivated plants in Japanese history. It was used for clothing, rope, nets, and paper.
It was the everyday fibre of commoners for centuries — long before cotton arrived from China.
But hemp in Japan wasn't purely functional. It was considered sacred. Shinto priests used hemp fibres in purification rituals; sacred hemp ropes (shimenawa) demarcated holy ground at shrines; sumo grand champions wore hemp ceremonial aprons. The plant had a spiritual dimension woven into the culture alongside its practical one.
You can even see it in Japanese textile pattern history. Asanoha (麻の葉) — literally "hemp leaf" — is one of the most enduring and beloved geometric patterns in Japanese craft, used on everything from kimono to ceramics. It became a symbol of strength and rapid growth, traditionally sewn into children's clothing as a wish for them to grow up healthy and resilient.
Hemp was eventually displaced by cotton during the Meiji industrialisation period, and then further marginalised post-WWII under prohibitions that swept across much of the world. But it was never really gone. It was just waiting.
What makes hemp such a good fibre for clothing?
Let me walk through the properties that genuinely make hemp interesting as a textile — not the marketing language, but the actual material characteristics.
It's strong. Hemp is one of the strongest natural fibres available. The fabric resists wear, pilling, and distortion, and it holds its shape through repeated washing in a way that many other natural fibres don't. It doesn't degrade over time — if anything, it gets better.
It breathes exceptionally well. Hemp has a naturally porous fibre structure that allows air to circulate freely. This makes it genuinely comfortable against skin in warm conditions — and more practically for socks, it keeps feet cooler and drier than many conventional materials.
It's naturally antimicrobial. This is the one that surprised me most when I first dug into the research. Hemp fibres have a natural resistance to bacteria, mould, and mildew that doesn't need to be chemically added or sprayed on. For socks — items that spend their days in warm, enclosed environments — this matters. It translates to less odour and longer freshness between washes. These properties really add to our values at Tabi Co.
It softens with use. New hemp can feel slightly stiff, particularly at higher concentrations. But unlike some fibres that degrade as they soften, hemp gets softer while staying strong. The more you wash it and wear it, the better it becomes. That's a fairly unusual quality.
It blends beautifully with cotton. Pure hemp is wonderful, but the sweet spot for everyday textiles — particularly socks — tends to be a blend. Hemp brings the strength, breathability, and antimicrobial properties; cotton brings softness and stretch. The two fibres complement each other in a way that feels almost designed.
The environmental case for hemp
I want to be careful here, because sustainability claims in fashion have become something of a minefield. Greenwashing is real, and broad statements about "eco-friendly" materials often obscure complicated truths.
But the environmental case for hemp is genuinely well-supported, and I think it's worth laying out clearly.
Water. Cotton is one of the most water-intensive crops in agriculture. Hemp, by contrast, can typically be grown on rainfall alone — it doesn't require the kind of irrigation infrastructure that cotton farming demands. Multiple peer-reviewed studies have confirmed the significant difference in water footprint between the two crops.
Pesticides. Conventional cotton farming accounts for a disproportionate share of global pesticide use relative to the land area it occupies. Hemp is naturally resistant to most pests and diseases, which means it can be grown with dramatically fewer chemical inputs.
Land. Hemp is a high-yield crop — it produces more usable fibre per hectare than cotton, and it grows quickly (typically 3–4 months to harvest). That means the land requirement per unit of fibre is lower.
Soil. Hemp has deep roots that prevent erosion, and it's sometimes used as a rotation crop precisely because it improves soil health rather than depleting it.
None of this makes hemp a magical solution to fashion's environmental problems. The processing of hemp into soft textile-grade yarn is still energy-intensive, and there are real questions about supply chain transparency at scale. But as a raw material, the evidence is genuinely positive.
Why it's been so hard to find (until now)
If hemp is this good, why hasn't it been everywhere for years?
The short answer is: politics and processing.
Post-WWII prohibitions on cannabis across much of the world put hemp farming in an impossible position. Even though industrial hemp has negligible THC, the legal ambiguity made it very difficult for farmers to grow and for manufacturers to source reliably. Decades of lost agricultural knowledge, dismantled supply chains, and regulatory friction meant that hemp went from being a global staple to a niche material that most textile manufacturers didn't know how to work with.
Processing is the other side of it. Getting hemp fibre fine and soft enough for garments — particularly for something as close to skin as a sock — requires specific knowledge and often specific machinery. Not every manufacturer has invested in understanding how to work with hemp properly. The result is that a lot of hemp fabric on the market is either too coarse, inconsistent, or blended in ways that don't bring out hemp's best qualities.
This is exactly why the producer behind our upcoming hemp collection matters so much. Sugiyama Knit Kogyo, based in Nara Prefecture, has spent decades developing not just expertise in tabi sock construction but a deep understanding of how to knit specialist natural fibres well. Their approach to hemp isn't an afterthought — it's the result of careful fibre selection and a knitting process refined specifically to get the best from the blend.
What we're working on
I've been deliberately vague about timelines here, because I'd rather say less and deliver than promise more than I can commit to. But I can say this:
We will be releasing Hemp tabi socks. Made by a family-run workshop in Nara that has custom-built machines designed solely for tabi construction. It's the first hemp tabi available in the UK, and possibly in Europe to our knowledge as of this day. We will have sizes that fits up to a 31cm foot length — which, if you've ever tried to find tabi in larger sizes, you'll know is genuinely unusual and extremely difficult!
More details to come. If you want to be the first to know when it launches, you can sign up to our mailing list below.
In the meantime, I hope this gives you a sense of why Hemp is worth paying attention to — not because it's fashionable right now, but because it has a 10,000-year track record of being genuinely useful.
Some things don't need reinventing. They just need rediscovering.
If you made it this far reading the blog, I am hugely grateful for your time. As a treat, here is also a preview of the hemp socks that I was wearing on a walk. Cannot wait for you to be a part of this!
