Among the designers I loved for the human hand and the traceable process was Donna Sgro in Australia, who made a dress from a fabric engineered like a butterfly's wing: no dye at all, structural color, the hue coming from how light hits the weave rather than from pigment poured into a river somewhere.
Donna is an academic now, a researcher and lecturer, her biomimicry work held in a museum. The conviction outlived the single garment.
What she was really practicing was provenance: a material whose properties you could explain and trace, the antithesis of the unaccountable supply chain. That instinct is becoming hard infrastructure. The EU's ecodesign regulation and its digital product passport will require a garment to carry its own record, what it is made of and where it has been, the very transparency Donna built into a dress by hand.
She made the future as an object you could put behind glass. The law is now trying to require it for everything else.