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In a world obsessed with makeovers, linen is luxuriating in its new look.

Made from the stems of flax plants (linum is Latin for flax), it is considered the oldest textile in human civilization and was used by ancient Egyptians to wrap their mummies.

Linen is beloved because it absorbs moisture and wicks perspiration from the skin, but its tendency to crease has made it a no-brainer for beach-ready off-white shirts and shapeless drawstring pants.

No longer. “It's not your grandmother's tablecloth,” says Sandra Tullio-Pow, an associate professor in Ryerson's School of Fashion. Adding waxy coatings, weaving in metallic threads, layering different colours and enhancing with leather or embroidery are techniques being employed to give the fabric an entirely different profile, sometimes to the point of being unrecognizable.

Judy Cornish, who founded the Canadian label Comrags with her partner, Judy Gunhouse, in 1983, is all over the new linen. “Linen on its own does have that hippie quality and it can become lifeless quite quickly,” she says from her Toronto store. “But when you mix it back with nylon or polyester, all of a sudden it's high-tech and you can get a really slick hand with it, and it rumples rather than creases. And that's what we love about it.”

Coating linen to give it more structure and a shiny finish is becoming increasingly widespread. “It's almost rubberized,” Cornish says. “Because linen is natural, it's quite fibrous, so things bond to it quite well.”

For Sandra Pittana, a Toronto-based fashion stylist who appears regularly on Cityline, treating and blending linen liberates it from its association with weather. This is referred to as “seasonless dressing” and has become an industry buzzword. “Now, what we're seeing is that they do these treatments because it can be used all year long,” she says (a long-time fan, Pittana sleeps on linen sheets in the summer).

It's even poised as a new fabric for winter, says Cornish, who used a linen-wool blend in the Comrags fall collection. She says the look is comparable to boiled wool but without the itchiness.

Price-wise, pure linen is on the higher end of the continuum, usually because it is produced in smaller batches than other textiles. Linen blends can be expensive because natural fibres may have to be dyed separately from synthetic ones. This is especially true with solid black, which Cornish says costs more than a three-colour print.

But as far as its impact on the environment, linen comes out a leader. Tullio-Pow cites an April article in the magazine Ecotextile News that compares the carbon footprint of linen and cotton. Guess which one requires fewer pesticides and less water? (Hint: not the fabric synonymous with T-shirts.)

Perhaps linen's most intriguing attribute and one that applies to the dresses, skirts, jackets, purses and even shoes in stores now is that it may be of use to anthropologists in the distant future. The coatings will probably wear off and the colour may fade, but the fabric will survive, whether fashionable or not, for years to come.