As a young student in 1989, fashionista Suzanne Lee hated science. After years of suffering through labs and tests in high school, the 19 year old Brit fled for art school, soon snuggling into a world of silk, seams, and buckles. But in 2003, while researching a book on future technologies of fashion, Lee bumped into a scientist at an art gallery in London. The chance meeting led to a discussion on the fashion industry's lack of sustainability, and how science, once Lee's arch-nemesis, might be the industry's best hope.
BioBiker: Vegetable leather jacket with black oxidation 'print' Copyright of the BioCouture Project 2010
"Textiles for clothing is one of the most polluting industries," says Lee, now a senior research fellow at the School of Fashion & Textiles at the Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design in London. Fashion labels typically invest slim to no money in research, she says, and are resistant to change, so it's up to designers to find and promote eco-friendly, high-tech alternatives. In an effort to lead the way, in 2003 Lee founded BioCouture, a fledgling research project proposing a futuristic fashion vision -- growing garments from vats of bacteria.
Today, Lee produces eerily beautiful jackets, dresses, and kimonos by culturing and shaping bacterial cellulose. The raw material for the clothing is grown for two weeks in a sugary green tea solution rich with bacteria and yeast. As the solution ferments, the microbes slowly excrete a sticky mat, forming a layer about 15mm thick. Lee carefully removes the layer, washes it in cold water, and spreads it on a flat wooden surface or smooth wooden mold to dry. Once all the water has evaporated, she peels the "textile," a stretchy, leather-like material, from the surface and cuts and sews it by hand. In an effort to avoid damaging the material with chemicals in dyes, Lee often colors it with fruit and vegetable stains. "Blueberry skins and beetroot work best," she says.
In the past seven years, Lee had made around 10 garments, many which have been on display at places like London's Science Museum. Though she has yet to gain the widespread acceptance of the fashion community -- "Fashion designers are fine about it as a material until you show how it's made and then they think it's somehow gruesome," she says -- Lee has become an eager recruit to the scientific community.
Early on in the inception of BioCouture, Lee partnered with David Hepworth, a materials scientist she met in the museum, and they began to informally explore the idea by growing bacterial cellulose in his garage and her bathroom. Today, to improve upon that process, Lee collaborates with researchers at Imperial College London.
Cellulose naturally absorbs water, which doesn't make it an ideal material to sport on a rainy day. "The [cellulose] clothing takes up huge amounts of water and swells, making wearing it a bit unpleasant," says Alexander Bismarck, an Imperial College materials scientist. Rather than chemically altering the cellulose after it has been made, a tedious and not particularly eco-friendly process, Bismarck and Lee, along with Paul Freemont, head of molecular biosciences at Imperial College, are trying to modify the bacteria or growth medium directly to make the cellulose more hydrophobic. It hasn't been easy, says Bismarck: There's a fine line between clothes that turn to goo in the rain and clothes with no moisture absorption all. "Hopefully we will be able to produce a leather-like material from cellulose that has [appropriate] properties for the fashion world," says Bismarck. "I believe, a couple of years down the line, there will be a market for it."
Though Lee's clothing is not ready for that market quite yet -- despite a deluge of requests, she does not currently sell her creations -- she says she wants to make an impression on the next generation of designers. "I hope that BioCouture serves to at least raise people's awareness to a different way of thinking -- that [the fashion industry] should look to science for the solutions to our problems," says Lee. "We have really only just begun to imagine what we might grow using this process!"
And Lee's changing her tune with regard to her previous distaste for science. "I went to art school to escape science, only to find that the most exciting creative thinking right now is emerging from science," she laughs.
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