Katharine Hamnett's roots extend deep into Bradford.

Her grandmother, one of the Bradford Listers, was the first woman to get a science degree and subsequently a doctorate from Leeds University during the Edwardian era. She also once had the dubious privilege of being chased around the dining table by the over amorous writer, G K Chesterton.

"My grandmother would have been thrilled that I'm talking to the Bradford Textile Society" said Miss Hamnett, a couple of hours before she spoke to a packed out ballroom at the Midland Hotel in the biggest gathering of the society for 50 years.

For the past 18 months she has been busy developing her new eco-ethical collection using environmentally-friendly fabrics produced by Baildon firm Wallass & Co, which was founded six years ago by textile society president Jon Wall.

Despite 36 years as a fashion guru, Miss Hamnett is the textile industry's fiercest critic by far, unashamedly using words like "horrific" and "horrendous" to describe its massive impact on people and their environments around the world.

She trotted out statistics of mind-bending proportions. The cotton industry makes up ten per cent of world agriculture but uses a quarter of all pesticides. She said it causes 20,000 deaths a year, countless suicides and three million people with long-term pollution and poverty-related illnesses.

Many of the world's 100 million cotton farmers are sold pesticides as part parcel of their deal with agents to buy seeds.

For years she's been campaigning against exploitation and environmental irresponsibility in the global rag trade. She's toured some of Africa's poorest nations to see that impact first hand.

The new collection, launched next year, is the first she has manufactured herself since 1989 and will be produced in Yorkshire. She said she's happier with this than any other collection she has produced since first setting up in 1969.

"Made In England gives a unique point

of difference from China and Turkey,"

she explains. "Made In England is

hugely respected around the world;

menswear has always come from England."

Miss Hamnett is pushing for Bradford and Yorkshire textile producers to adopt ever greener ways of making cloth using new techniques. This is not just altruism, she said, but fulfilling a clear market demand.

"People are realising we have to address environmental issues and climate change. And Jon Wall is producing a beautiful selection of cloths which are environmentally state-of-the-art. It means, for example, that waste water from dying is re-cycled. Huge progress has been made."

Devoid of Vivienne Westwood glam, Miss Hamnett seems more like an art college lecturer in her distressed denims which look as if they might have originated some time in the 1980s.

Another of her weapons in combating environmental damage is promoting the idea that men's suits, for example, should not be throwaway fashion items but excellently crafted masterpieces which should last for decades.

And Miss Hamnett has invested years of her own life looking at the gruesome minutiae of how textiles damage the planet.

"I wanted to prove to myself and the industry that something could be done. What I was doing was regarded as marginal but now it's mainstream."

As well as railing against the industry as a whole, she reserves particular venom for places like China, whom she accuses of having no ethics at all. And she said, between gritted teeth, that she finds it amazing that with its appalling human rights record, the world's fastest growing economy was allowed into the International Wool Textile Organisation.

So her key message on this trip to Bradford is that by combining the highly-respected Made In England moniker with ethical and environmental credentials gives Bradford fabric producers the opportunity to further strengthen their position in top end niche markets by fulfilling consumer demand for greener textiles.

"I would love to work with other Bradford manufacturers," she said. "We can change the way we work, save the planet and save our jobs. Climate change isn't going to happen in 30 years, it's happening in our lifetime.We should be saving oil for fibres not for fuel."