ARKET Puts Hydroponic Cotton Into Its Fall Collection

Cotton's newest field has no soil in it. ARKET, the lifestyle brand inside H&M Group, has added hydroponically grown cotton to its material library for the fall 2026 collection, the point where a laboratory project becomes a buying decision. The cotton comes from a partnership between Spanish agricultural technology company Magtech and H&M Group's Circular Innovation Lab, and the fiber in the finished garments is ordinary natural cotton. Only the farming is new.

The system replaces the field with plumbing. Roots sit in circulating water inside growing channels and take a controlled nutrient mix directly, and the water is recovered and reused instead of draining into the ground. Magtech co-founder David René Rodríguez puts the density in concrete terms: one hectare holds approximately 30,600 plants distributed across 52 growing channels, each about 98 meters long. Walking the channels once means covering more than five kilometers of crop.

The project's first harvest already cleared the bar that kills most textile experiments. An initial five-tonne batch grown in Spain passed quality checks and was turned into garments, and a second growing site is now being developed in India. Research on hydroponically grown cotton has found its fiber properties comparable to conventional cotton, which is the whole commercial question: a sustainable fiber that feels worse isn't a product, it's a press release.

The monitoring is where the water system earns its keep. Cameras judge ripeness from flower color and catch infestations early, so treatment reaches a few plants instead of a whole field, and spraying only what's needed cuts pesticide use. The closed loop also keeps nutrients from washing into nearby rivers, where conventional cotton runoff is a major cause of eutrophication. The plants partly tolerate saltwater and treated wastewater, which widens where a system can run.

Both partners are careful not to oversell it. Rodríguez says the project isn't claiming zero impact and isn't trying to replace conventional cotton; the goal is to demonstrate, quantify and independently validate a complementary way to grow it, and the environmental gains still await an independent life-cycle assessment. Martin Ekenbark, who leads H&M Group's Circular Innovation Lab, frames the appeal as placement: you can set the system up in a car park, on a rooftop, even in the desert, as long as there's sun and a reasonable source of water.

That placement argument is the real pitch. Cotton that needs no fertile land frees farmland for food and lets fiber grow near the factories that spin it, in regions where water is scarce or soil is poor. Whether it survives contact with fashion's cost structure is the open question, and ARKET's fall rail is the first public test: the garments are priced and hung like any others, and shoppers will grade the experiment without reading a word of the research.