For Isabella Rossellini, shear bliss is a sheep farm in upstate New York | Canada Voices

This summer, Isabella Rossellini spent her 74th birthday weekend surrounded by more than 3,000 people in Northern Italy. Instead of a quiet family dinner, the Italian model-actress-director-entomologist marked the occasion at Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore, attending an open-air screening of the 1990 film Wild at Heart, starring Rossellini, Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern.

By the time David Lynch, Rossellini’s former partner, directed her in Wild at Heart, she had already made a striking – and controversial – impression four years earlier in his 1986 psychological drama, Blue Velvet. She played Dorothy Vallens, an abused nightclub singer, in what many critics consider her breakout and Lynch’s masterpiece.

Speaking by phone from Rome, where she was filming her latest project, Rossellini reflected on her early career as a high-profile actress and fashion model. Those years, as well as crowded nights like the recent one in Bologna, are far from what she calls her “usual natural habitat.”

Instead, she pointed to Mama Farm, her muddy, 28-acre property in upstate New York that she owns and runs with her daughter – food writer and model Elettra Wiedemann – as a sanctuary and the setting for her most recent chapter in life. The property is at the centre of a documentary called Farm to Fashion, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June and is slated for a Canadian premiere in February, 2027.

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Rossellini explains that the film shines a light on an often overlooked side of clothing production: the living sources behind the materials. Having spent decades wearing collections from high-fashion brands, she’s worried about the amount of microplastics on the racks and companies who sidestep sustainable practices for profit.

“I always loved fashion and style, so I was quite disappointed when I discovered that this industry is one of the most polluting,” she said.

While the farm may seem removed from the runway, Rossellini insists the two are deeply intertwined. “It’s not reinvention at all. My interests are always close to each other,” she said. “Society tells us that women have to keep reinventing ourselves over and over again, but I just follow my curiosities.”

“I wanted to be a model. I wanted to be an actress. I wanted to be a student. Then, I wanted to be a farmer. But I’m not iconic because of any of this, I just won’t make up my mind.”

The hallmarks of sustainable fashion are scattered throughout Farm To Fashion’s scenes: a commitment to community, a reverence for heritage and a belief that wool can offer a more responsible alternative to the fast-fashion industry. Rossellini’s personal relationships with shearers, millers, designers and the environment connect her to an alternative fashion ecosystem, one which prioritizes the environment over the demands of large-scale garment production.

“There are some days I much prefer to be around what I think of as the most beautiful thing in the world: my flock,” Rossellini said. She wasn’t referring to the many fans of her films, but rather, her herd of eight sheep. She named one of them Frida Kahlo, after the artist who inspired Rossellini’s androgynous, unibrowed character Perdita Durango in Wild at Heart.

To celebrate Farm to Fashion, an event in New York is in the works for Oct. 15, with an aim to showcase a capsule collection of textiles and garments that Rossellini co-created alongside regional mills, including Battenkill Fibers. The presentation will be hosted by Rossellini and designer Donna Karan, who is also featured in the film. It will highlight Rossellini’s clothing and home wear collaborations with custom textile expert Lilly Marsh, whose PhD research explores North American hand-knitting traditions.

Another key creative partner is artist and sustainable fashion designer Mimi Prober, Rossellini’s design confidante, whose eponymous label was established in 2014. Prober, who also works with Karan’s lifestyle collection Urban Zen, has long championed a more considered approach to making clothes, including through zero-waste methods and upcycled materials. Prober said that returning to natural fibres is a “necessary rethinking of fashion that rebuilds connections across the natural textile landscape.”

Prober’s work resists landfill overflow and fast fashion’s reliance on synthetic fabrics, both of which are part of a far greater crisis. The United Nations Environment Programme reported in 2025 that 92 million tons of textile waste are accumulated annually around the world. A 2018 article from the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment estimates that more than 15,000 chemicals are used in textile manufacturing.

Equally alarming, Rossellini said, is how little those who make fashion know about their source material. “I spoke to designers who go to the wool fair in Italy to buy the best and softest wool, but I was surprised they didn’t know … where the sheep lived, who shared their pastures or even which shepherd took care of them – they had no understanding of what their living conditions were,” Rossellini said.

“Many of them lose half the story by ignoring where the natural fibres actually come from before wool is spun.”

Rossellini’s initial draw to the natural world began during childhood excursions to the Italian countryside, and to buy produce from farmers with her parents, actress Ingrid Bergman and director Roberto Rossellini. “The farmer’s market is something that I grew up with. In North America, it seems to be more popular in recent years, but in Italy, it’s a way of living. I learned to love animals as a little girl.”

Fuelled by those early memories, she went on to make indie film projects such as her viral series Green Porno (2008), in which she appears in papier mâché insect costumes to perform skits on animal reproduction. She followed up with Seduce Me (2010) and Mammas (2013), which also decode the dating, mating and parental rituals of insects, marine life and wildlife in an equally comical, informed and artful way.

At 66, she went back to school to earn a master’s degree in animal behaviour and conservation from Hunter College in New York. Her studies helped develop a clear vision for Mama Farm, a place where biodiversity leapt from the page to become a part of her daily practice.

“Industrialization tends to become monoculture, that’s true from spinach to corn to wool,” she said of her hands-on learning. “It isn’t good for the bigger picture,” she explained, noting that biodiversity strengthens ecosystems by making them more resilient to disease.

She described a remarkable experience she had from playing barber to her flock, involving Mary Jeanne Packer, the owner of the Battenkill carding and spinning mill.

“When I first sheared my sheep, I brought the fleece to MJ Packer,” she said. “Just by looking at the fleece, MJ said, ‘Oh, this sheep had a trauma six months ago – it’s registering in the fibre.’ I discovered she was right. Six months earlier, in fact, this particular sheep was moved from another farm to my farm, which probably was shocking.”

Her work with the natural world has also led her to some amusing muses. Mid-conversation, she giggled about a one-of-a-kind poncho creation she made with Prober, which sold for US$2,000. The design brings together whimsical doodles of women’s breasts, cow udders and opossum teats. “I’m not very skilled as a knitter, but teats and breasts are easy to embroider,” she said, before exclaiming, “The opossum has 13 teats, how fascinating!”

Rossellini’s affection for her barnyard crew has proven to deliver regular serotonin rushes. She shares them often with her more than 1.2 million Instagram followers, posting about the humorous challenges that come with working with four-legged friends.

Her social-media posts, much like her offbeat short films about nature, are infectiously fun but scientifically sound. On Instagram, she discusses how biology informs the various ways and time periods when sheep are sheared, and cites the obstacles to goat herding and beekeeping. On occasion, she’ll report a mysterious furry thief striking the chicken coop.

Farm to Fashion director Oliver Halfin spent more than a month with Rossellini, chronicling a tight-knit circle of the small-scale farmers and ranchers surrounding her haven. The film frames the area’s wool belt as anything but a hobby, a trend or something to baa haa about. “It was a living lesson in environmental connection and social responsibility,” he said.

Italian-American PR mogul Kelly Cutrone, one of the film’s producers, says the natural fibre movement is growing across borders. Milo & Dexter, a Quebec-based label using 50-per-cent Canadian-made wool, is just one example of the emerging, homegrown golden fleece of opportunity.

Cutrone’s agency last year partnered with dating app Grindr, Rainbow Wool farm and fashion designer Michael Schmidt on Schmidt’s I Wool Survive show, a 37-piece charity collection made using wool made in Lohne, Germany. Proceeds went to LGBTQ initiatives across the world. Cutrone will also be producing a documentary about Schmidt, slated for release next year.

“It’s projects like Farm To Fashion that make me think that I should just give up this whole celebrity and fashion thing and do PR for these sheep,” Cutrone joked. “Everywhere I turn, it’s like sheep chic!”

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Let’s not forget: Rossellini’s legacy is rooted in envelope-pushing elegance. Her films include the anti-aging comedy Death Becomes Her and Conclave, the 2024 film that brought her an Oscar nomination. On her farm, a shed housing a John Deere tractor is surrounded by a gallery of Vogue covers she’s graced, photographed by fashion photographers Richard Avedon, Steven Meisel and Albert Watson. This unlikely meeting of glamour and agriculture is just one of the many contrasts Rossellini grew up with.

“My mom had a big career and was a modern, independent woman, but I did go to a school in Italy with nuns as teachers, and they were independent as well,” she said. “They had great authority. Many of their parents wanted them to get married, but they were rebels and followed their passion.”

Fashion may still be obsessed with following trends, but Rossellini seems far more interested in following her sheep, even when the industry keeps following her. Yet, she doesn’t consider herself a guru. “I don’t really want to tell society how to look at women or … how to buy or wear something, I just do what I do because it’s interesting to me.”