Where do your clothes come from? Not just the shop, or the country of origin—where were the garments sewn, the crops dug and planted? So diffuse are modern supply chains, there’s a good chance even the brand couldn’t tell you. But Sukkha Citta knows. The Jakarta-based fashion label is pioneering a “farm to closet” model, where each of its garments is traceable to the artisans that spun it, right down to the farm where it was grown.
Denica Riadini-Flesch launched Sukkha Citta in 2016, after working in Europe as a development economist. When she returned to her native Indonesia to take a job at the World Bank, Riadini-Flesch saw up close the limits of aid. “It was building bridges and building hospitals and all that, but I started understanding the incredible impact that you can have on other people’s lives when you simply create opportunities that weren’t there before,” she says.
In Indonesia’s rural areas, farmland is latticed with humid rainforest, and farmers growing crops such as cotton are often older women, known as Ibus, only 2 percent of whom earn a living wage. The impact of intensive agriculture—and particularly the garment industry—on the countryside has been profound: the Citarum river which runs through West Java, for example, is among the most polluted in the world, partly due to an influx of dyes from the country’s textile factories.
“I saw how these women unknowingly use chemicals that are banned in most developed countries, dumping it into the rivers where their children play in,” Riadini-Flesch says. “And for the first time, I understood that there's someone else, somewhere else, who is paying the true cost of all our things. I realized the simple choice of choosing what shirt to wear today links you profoundly to the lives of these women who are making them.”
At the time, Riadini-Flesch had another reason to make a change: she had been diagnosed with a bone tumor. “I think, for the first time in my life, I started asking questions about, what is it that really makes me happy?” (Sukacita means “joy” in Bahasa.) She began working with small farmers to explore how they could change their farming practices, moving away from chemical-intensive methods and returning instead to indigenous, regenerative techniques. It wasn’t an easy sell, after years of lobbying from the chemicals industry. “I asked them about what they remembered growing up on the farm. What did their grandmother plant?” says Riadini-Flesch. One of the Ibus responded, offering up a single hectare, where they planted cotton next to corn, chilli, mung beans, and other crops. “The corn is what they call the protective crop—it protects the cash crop from too much sun. The chillies are a trap crop—the pests go there, not to the cotton. And then the mung bean is actually a nitrogen fixer,” she explains. The results were profound. “Within three years, the yield increased six times.”
At the same time, Sukkha Citta began to work with collectives of local artisans, who could not only cut and sew the designs, but dye them using all-natural methods, such as locally-grown indigo. “That’s the unique thing with Sukkha Citta,” Riadini-Flesch says. “It’s 100 percent farm to closet. Our clothes are dyed with plants that we are growing ourselves.”
To date, Riadini-Flesch says the company’s practices have prevented over 5 million litres of dye pollution, and regenerated more than 60 hectares of land. It estimates that each of its designs—menswear, womenswear, and unisex garments, from floating dresses to sculptural coats and delicate accessories—touches 12 families, and takes 180 days to produce. Most importantly, the women working with Sukkha Citta have found that their earnings grew sixfold. “That’s when I started to understand that not only does this way of doing things empower women, it can increase their livelihoods at the same time. It can restore soil health, it can improve biodiversity, it can sequester excess carbon.”
As a social enterprise (it’s a registered B Corp) Sukkha Citta reinvests its profits in the communities. Working with local artisans, the company has opened craft schools in the villages, where locals can learn craft and farming techniques. “It’s a place where we are repairing the broken lineage of craft,” she says.
In 2023, Riadini-Flesch was awarded a Rolex Award for Sukkha Citta’s work supporting regenerative farming and sustainable fashion. Originally launched in 1976, the Awards support individuals pursuing innovative work and causes that protect the environment, improve human well-being, or advance our understanding of the world. Since 2019, the Awards for Enterprise have been made under the company’s Perpetual Planet initiative, with a major focus on ocean conservation, protecting wilderness, and preserving the natural world. To date, Rolex has supported 160 Laureates all over the world.
“It’s been incredible, because I feel I get to share this story on a scale that was before unimaginable,” she says. “Sukkha Citta is not a business, Sukkha Citta is a movement, and my endgame is to have this blueprint adopted across industries, across sectors. So the Rolex Award has allowed me to do exactly that, and start pushing for this to be adopted globally.” With Rolex’s support, Sukkha Citta has expanded its schools program—it has four, and is working on a fifth—and has enabled it to digitize its teachings. “The Rolex Award is helping us build an app that digitizes our curriculum, that allows us to train farmers in regenerative farming without me being there.”
That, for Sukkha Citta, is the true impact of farm-to-closet: changing the culture of fashion. The brand’s clothing, for example, is not seasonal, with its styles instead designed to last years, and to fit multiple body types. “It helps people in reducing the amount of things that they have to buy. Like our dresses, they all have pockets, and are field tested to be able to fit multiple body types. Women’s bodies change; our clothes are engineered and designed to be able to allow women to go through these life changes without having to buy more stuff,” she says. “That means we also have no pressure to push products to you. We don’t have to empty our warehouse because it’s no longer the season. You can wear it today and five years from now it’s still relevant.”
For Riadini-Flesch, the impact of Sukkha Citta’s work can be felt in the clothes themselves. “Our customers keep telling me that when they wear these clothes, it makes them think about what is it that they actually really want to do outside of the hamster wheel. It makes them think about purpose. It makes them think about being part of something bigger. And then they get inspired to actually do something in them,” she says.
There are challenges, of course. Not least the weather: recently, wet weather has slowed down production. “In rainy season, we tend to be able to only work with really blue colors, because that’s when the Indigo is in harvest. So what you see in our stores are products that follow these seasons. It’s the same with your farmer’s market: you buy what’s local, you buy what’s abundant, and when it’s available, right? And I think that’s ultimately what we need more of, as a consumer.”
By 2030, Sukkha Citta aims to impact 10,000 lives and regenerate 1,000 hectares of land. “I think that’s the beautiful thing about our work: the bigger the business grows, the more people we can lift up.”
To find out more about Rolex and its Perpetual Planet Initiative, visit rolex.org, and explore our Planet Pioneers partnership page here.
