From mushroom to luxury handbag: will fungi be the new leather?

A shoe, handbag or wallet that naturally recovers from a scratch? For that tour de force, the fashion sector looks to fungi. Research into fungi (or fungi) as an ecological alternative to leather is on the rise. The possibilities sound futuristic: from self-healing material to 3D printing techniques. Fashion brands such as Balenciaga, Stella McCartney, PVH (the parent company of Tommy Hilfiger, among others) and Hermès have all entered into partnerships with companies that use fungi.

Or rather: on mycelium. The true potential lies in that network of hyphae, explains Belgian professor of bioscience engineering Eveline Peeters. “Mushrooms are the tip of the iceberg. You can compare them with the fruit, such as an apple. Mycelium, that is the tree itself.”

Coat of 9000 euros

To make mold leather, you first grow the mold. A small amount of mold is added to large containers of liquid with food. If you leave it for two weeks at the right humidity and temperature, a layer of fungal threads will grow on it.

We call that layer the skin” says Peters. “After two weeks it is harvested and treated to make it look like leather.” Two weeks of production time is considerably less than the three years on average for leather.

Moreover, you need less than a hundred liters of water per square meter of mycelium. That is about 10,000 liters for the same amount of leather. An interesting advantage for fashion companies that want to get rid of the large ecological footprint of leather. “And then we haven’t even talked about animal suffering,” says Peeters.

All this means that many brands want to test mycelium, especially in the luxury segment. In 2022, designer Stella McCartney released a first handbag, Demna Gvasalia showed a first coat of hyphae for the winter collection of 2022 from Balenciaga: oversized, long and black, with a nod to the film The Matrix.

But between a limited edition jacket worth €9,000 and a mass-produced product, there are still years of research, says Maurizio Montalti, co-founder of Sqim, the company that produced the material for Balenciaga’s jacket. Sqim is probably the largest European producer of mycelium, with several thousand sheets of one square meter per year. “We hope to be able to produce on an industrial scale in six years’ time. Scaling up a biological process is not something you can do in the blink of an eye,” says Montalti.

More environmentally friendly, but not cheaper

The fact that you can make mycelium in a laboratory makes it interesting and complex at the same time. “I compare it to antibiotics,” says Peeters. It took years of intensive research to perfect it. Now it is about a living organism about which we still have a lot to learn.”

One of the variants with which the researcher achieved the best results comes from a fungus that one of her students picked in a forest in Linkebeek, near Brussels. “How many other species would be even better, we have no idea yet.”

Mycelium may be more environmentally friendly than leather, but it is not cheaper. It currently costs about the same as high-quality leather, reports the leading fashion website Business of Fashion (BoF).

That price tag prevents the material from quickly getting through to the general public. “And that’s a shame,” says sociologist Aurélie Van de Peer (KU Leuven), who studies the mechanisms behind ecological fashion. “Ecology thus takes on an elitist side, it becomes a status symbol. That cannot be the intention.”

Doubts as to whether mycelium will meet customer expectations also seem to dampen the fashion companies’ initial eagerness. By 2021, startup companies working with non-animal leather raised nearly $900 million. A year later, that had already dropped to $ 420 million, according to a report from the think tank Material Innovation Initiative. “While more research is needed,” says Montalti.

As good as leather?

Hermès, the manufacturer of luxury handbags, invested 125 million dollars in Mycoworks, a California company, in early 2022. But apart from some photos of a prototype, we don’t see anything on the shelves. The launch was delayed several times.

An official reason is not given, but presumably the end result did not correspond to what luxury brands such as Hermès want to offer: timeless heirlooms that are passed down from generation to generation.

That customers do not adjust their expectations for ecological alternatives, McCartney experienced with her first handbag, she said to BoF . “To make mycelium a success story, customers must not feel that it is a compromise. From the way it looks to the way it feels, there should be no difference from leather. As long as that is not the case, many brands will not take the plunge.”

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