Gabriela Hearst, Chloé’s creative director is on a mission to reduce the brand’s environmental impact and to reconnect its customers with nature. At Hearst’s behest, in May this year, close-ups of oyster mushrooms appeared on the company’s Instagram feed. Not all of Chloé’s 9.5m followers liked them. “This gave me the shivers,” said one comment. “Bring back the fashion!” read multiple others.
Hearst’s nature-first approach comes at a critical juncture for the fashion industry. After a pandemic year in which profits slumped and customer interest in sustainability and eco-responsibility soared, many luxury brands know they urgently need to get with the carbon-negative programme. Mushrooms, long a fashionable motif, are one piece of the puzzle providing both conceptual inspiration and innovative raw materials.
“They’re incredible, the source of our world,” says Hearst, over the phone from New York, citing Merlin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures as a prized reference. As Sheldrake writes: “Many of the most dramatic events on Earth have been — and continue to be — a result of fungal activity.”
Hovering between death and rebirth, feeding off waste and decaying matter, mushrooms offered the Delhi-based designer Rahul Mishra the perfect metaphor for the pandemic. Mishra was so enthralled by mushrooms’ starring role in David Attenborough’s documentary A Life On Our Planet that he based his entire spring 2021 couture collection on fungi.
His collection comprises painstakingly handworked gowns that mimic tree bark, teeming with sequin-embellished tulle and silk organza spores. It resonated: in the first quarter of 2021, the company performed better financially than in (pre-Covid) 2019 “by a large margin.”
Fungi are also at the forefront of new fashion technologies. Reishi, a leather alternative made from mycelium, the threadlike root structure of fungi, and grown in trays by American biotech start-up MycoWorks, so impressed Hermès that the French luxury goods house partnered with the company on a new premium material called Sylvania. Produced by feeding agricultural waste such as sawdust to a fungus, Sylvania will be cured and finished in Hermès’ tanneries in France and then shaped and combined with H plume canvas and Evercalf calfskin to form the Victoria bag, available in late 2021.
With conventional chrome-tanned, cow-derived leather consuming huge amounts of fossil fuels and generating polluted water, “mushroom leather” is being touted as an answer to one of fashion’s biggest problems. Lululemon, Adidas, Kering and Stella McCartney have all partnered with Bolt Threads, another US start-up, on Mylo, a biomaterial made from compressed mycelium….