Digicam Hemp T-Shirt. 280 GSM, the heaviest shirt in the shop.

55 percent hemp, 45 percent organic cotton, 280 GSM, in our digicam hemp leaf pattern. Wholesale available. Free US shipping.

The fabric has a three thousand year head start

The word canvas comes from cannabis. It moved from Greek into Latin as cannabis, into Vulgar Latin as cannabaceus, meaning made of hemp, and into English as canvas. The cloth is named after the plant, because for most of recorded history that is what the cloth was made of.

Hemp got that job because it could take the abuse. In the age of sail, a frigate the size of the USS Constitution needed roughly forty miles of cordage, and hemp was the fiber used for her standing rigging, her running rigging, the bolt ropes sewn into her sails and her anchor cables. When the Navy re-rigged her between 1927 and 1931, the Charlestown ropewalk spun about sixty seven tons of rope for the job, and the standing rigging was natural hemp.

It was illegal to grow here, and now it is not

Hemp and marijuana are the same species, and for decades US law did not separate them, so the fiber crop disappeared along with the drug. That changed on December 20, 2018, when the Farm Bill amended the Controlled Substances Act to exclude hemp, defined as cannabis containing no more than 0.3 percent delta-9 THC, from the legal definition of marijuana.

The mills have not come back yet. There is no US spinner and weaver making fabric like this at the weight and quality we want, so we design the garment here, choose the blend and the fit, and have it manufactured to our spec overseas. We would rather say that plainly than let you assume otherwise.

What it is actually like

DigiCam Pattern

How the crop is actually grown

Fiber hemp is planted dense on purpose. The canopy closes early and shades out most weeds, which is why the crop is commonly grown with little or no herbicide.

It is also much less thirsty than cotton. A review pooling twenty eight published studies put hemp at roughly 38 percent lower crop water requirement and roughly 60 percent lower water footprint than cotton for the same fiber.

Details and specs

Select your size from the dropdown above. Shirts run slightly long and will shrink a little after the first wash and dry, so order one size up.

Wholesale and where to find us