Fashion-wise there have been quite a few companies that created accessories using mycelium leather. Last year, Stella McCartney, for example, launched garments and accessories made with Mylo mushroom leather produced by California-based company Bolt Threads.
Danish Ganni also announced at the recent Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen a range of saddlebags and wallets made with Bolt Threads' Mylo leather.
But it isn't just established companies who seem to be focusing on mushroom-based materials: young designers are also looking for innovative solutions to radically change products.
One of the showcases at Base Milano (Via Bergognone 34, the event closed yesterday), featured young designers who developed projects revolving around inclusion, sustainability and the possibility of creating a new and exciting world, conjuring in this way visions of an exciting future, almost a micro-utopia. One space, entitled Temporary Home, featured an exhibition with 5 designers presenting 5 scenarios for the future.
Nicholas Rapagnani, in collaboration with his project partners theFaST Lab of The Free University of Bozen-Bolzano and Salewa (Oberalp Group), showcased his "Growing Sneaker" project.
Rapagnani has a passion for sneakers and natural science, but he also loves sustainability and knows that sneakers represent a burden to our ecosystems as, when we discard an old pair, the shoes aren't usually recycled, but end up in a landfill.
The young researcher therefore combined footwear design with microbiology for an innovative product created with fungal mycelium.
Rapagnani first started an experience-based investigation, carrying out a series of experiments with mycelium-based materials at the FaST Lab, the laboratories of Science and Technology faculty at UniBz.
Petri dish micro-moulds were used to let mycelium-based material grow following the sneaker components' shapes.
Rapagnani and the microbiologists who helped him experimented with these prototypes reproduced in micro dimensions and mixed them with hemp, leather, and TPU (thermoplastic polyurethane). They obtained three different prototypes for a material that could potentially replace the plastic parts of a shoe such as the sole or segments of the upper creating a sort of circular revolution.
Obviously this project is still in its initial phase, but, hopefully, some famous brands will invest on Rapagnani's research. The young designer may need another couple of years to develop a more industrially viable alternative, but, with the necessary funds, he would make faster progresses.
But Base wasn't just about sneakers: there were other interdisciplinary projects, at times suspended between art and science, that employed fungi cultures.
Rebecca Schedler's introduced her "Symbiopunk" project. Developed in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut for her graduation at the Design Academy Eindhoven last year, "Symbiopunk" stands at the intersection between design and science.
"Symbiopunk" is indeed a bioreactor and composting system converting human faeces into fertile hummus by introducing fungi cultures to perform the digestion. The project tackles the taboos around defecation, showing how human waste can be used as fertilizer for agriculture and also highlights the importance of fungi cultures that feed on human waste. Schedler also points out that her project is a mutual inter-species give-and-take.
Projects like these ones prompt us to research and look for new materials through bio-fabrication and collaborations between designers and scientists or, in these cases designers and microbiologists. It is simply refreshing to see more young people taking these paths rather than limiting themselves to merely creating another design object or another fashion collection. Guess the future is definitely in these projects rather than in the umpteenth fashion collaboration.
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