When we try to predict the future
When we try to predict the future, it's easy to get hung up on miracle technologies alone.
But what if the most disruptive future innovations were organic? Incorporating nature rather than dominating it. Biocouture is a concept that incorporates life and biological materials into fashion and sportswear.
This is one of the most provocative initiatives in the industry today. I wrote a book about the future of fashion, trying to figure out what might happen in fashion in 50 years, and I talked to scientists and engineers, and one of them was a biologist.
He was the first person to say, if you want to be the first to completely rethink how you can make clothes, imagine growing a dress from liquid using bacteria. That idea blew my mind.
We started by growing in small containers in my bathroom. Experimenting with temperature and covering, we soon saw that there was something promising.
The process we use is ridiculously simple. It's not really that hard to produce something that not only looks and feels like textiles, but can also be sewn like a regular piece of fabric.
This idea completely changed the way I understood how to create the fashion of the future.
Our basic recipes are green tea, sugar, something like vinegar. Then it starts to be cultured with bacteria. It becomes a base - a mother culture, which will then grow on the surface of the liquid.
And it will have the shape of the container it is contained in.
Therefore, you need to design a container in advance that will be the right shape and for the material you are growing.
Here is an example of laser perforation. This method of fashion production is more like fermenting beer, or creating food, than any kind of traditional textile production. When the material is dry, there is no smell, when wet, it resembles sugar.
As soon as the material dried, we cut out the details with a laser.
It's clear that the drawing is abstract, but in fact it is a form of bacteria that we use. We collaborate with scientists who grow materials in the lab using living organisms.
And we help them move these materials from the lab to the market. Imagine future products that will be made from living organisms for fashion and design.
The textile industry developed based on the use of natural resources. For example, cotton from the fields of India or nylon made from petroleum products. Once the fabric was produced, cut and sewn.
If the consumer could be a garment engineer, we might be able to reduce the impact of this old world tacit pact.
When you think about fermentation and living organisms, there is no concept of waste. And the ultimate potential is that you can grow tissue to the shape that you have in mind.
Right now we are not genetically engineering these bacteria to make materials. But the future will be to engineer bacteria to give them the properties we want.
If we want it to repel water, or we want it to deliver some nutrients or give properties to your skin, that can be designed too.
To understand what will be fashionable in 50 years, you need to talk to the scientists and engineers who are working in the lab right now on new experimental materials and new ways of thinking about manufacturing. Ninety percent of the planet is covered in cellulose materials.
We are very inspired by 3D printing. It is not the printing of today, which still uses petrochemicals or plastic, filling the world with more plastic. This is our enemy. I want it to be organically natural. Most of the players in the textile business do not talk to scientists (smiley) , doing research and asking these questions.
