Base Layer System / Edition 01
The layer worn closest to you, stripped of everything that doesn’t belong.
To make toxic clothing unacceptable. The clean structural layer between you and everything else.
01 / The question
Most people never ask what their clothing is made of. You read the label on your food. Your socks sit against your skin all day — and almost no one reads theirs. What’s in it should be the first thing you ask, not the last.
02 / The problem — The standard sock is a finished product. We mean that literally.
A conventional sock is dyed for colour, bleached for white, brightened to look cleaner than it is, and often resin-finished so it holds its shape. Some are treated with antimicrobial biocides — silver, triclosan — to mask odour.
None of that is cotton. All of it is added after the fibre, and most of it stays in the fabric you pull over your skin.
STROMA leaves every one of those steps out. Not reduced. Out.
03 / The environment — Your feet are the test your socks fail.
Warm, damp, enclosed, and in constant contact with skin for hours at a time — exactly the condition under which dyes, finishes, and residual treatment chemicals are most mobile. The part of you that sweats the most is the part you should treat the most carefully.
- 250,000 — sweat glands across your two feet, the densest skin on your body
- ½ pint — moisture your feet can put out in a single day
- 0 — dyes, finishes, or biocides in a STROMA sock for that environment to release
STROMA gives that environment nothing to release. No dye to run. No finish to break down. No biocide to leach. Just cotton in the state it was grown.
04 / Non-toxic by composition — What’s present. What’s absent. Both, in full.
Present: Organic cotton (93–95%, greige/raw) · Bio-elastane (5–7%, bio-based, Hyosung creora Bio-Based, fully encased) · Citric-acid softening (from a natural source)
Absent: Synthetic dyes (no colour, ever) · Chlorine bleach (unbleached) · Optical brighteners (none) · Formaldehyde finishes (no wrinkle resins) · Silicone softeners (no synthetic hand-feel) · Antimicrobial biocides (no silver, no triclosan)
Every product page and every hangtag carries this ledger. The list does the persuading.
05 / The state — The way cotton comes before anyone changes it.
Undyed. No colour is applied to the cloth — ever. The off-white you see is the true tone of the cotton.
Unbleached. No chlorine, no peroxide. We don’t whiten what nature didn’t.
Unfinished. No softeners, brighteners, or wrinkle resins. The fabric leaves the factory in its greige state.
06 / The system — Base Layer System
Worn closest to the body, stripped of anything that doesn’t belong. Each STROMA piece is built from raw, untreated organic cotton and finished with nothing. One standard, applied without exception.
Packaging — The standard doesn’t stop at the cotton.
Shipped in a 100% unbleached, recycled kraft belly band, closed with a die-cut paper tab or plant-based adhesive. Zero plastic tape, zero polybags, zero shrink-wrap.