5 textile innovations fighting fast fashion

1. Fungal Leather

Demand for leather alter­na­tives is grow­ing as con­sumers increas­ing­ly ques­tion the eth­i­cal and envi­ron­men­tal impact of wear­ing chem­i­cal­ly treat­ed ani­mal hides. Yet syn­thet­ic sub­sti­tutes for leather are no panacea as they’re derived from fos­sil fuels, require the use of haz­ardous chem­i­cals in their pro­duc­tion and are not biodegrad­able.

Fun­gal bio­mass, extract­ed from myceli­um, offers a new and excit­ing way for­ward, accord­ing to a recent paper from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vien­na, Impe­r­i­al Col­lege Lon­don and RMIT Uni­ver­si­ty in Aus­tralia, pub­lished in Nature Sus­tain­abil­i­ty.

Pro­duc­ing fun­gal myceli­um is typ­i­cal­ly low cost. It can be grown on saw­dust or oth­er forestry or agri­cul­tur­al waste, then treat­ed to pro­duce a leather-like tex­tile, which can be as durable and flex­i­ble as leather, though is of course veg­an and ani­mal free. The growth of fun­gi is car­bon neu­tral and, if it isn’t com­bined with oth­er syn­thet­ic mate­ri­als, biodegrad­able at end of life.

In the last five years, the use of myceli­um as a sus­tain­able tex­tile has gen­er­at­ed much aca­d­e­m­ic and com­mer­cial inter­est. And com­pa­nies in Italy, the Unit­ed States and Indone­sia have already pro­duced pro­to­types. Mycotech from Indone­sia have made hand­bags, train­ers and wal­lets, while Bolt Threads in Amer­i­ca col­lab­o­rat­ed on hand­bags and totes with Stel­la McCart­ney and Chester Wal­lace.

The low raw mate­r­i­al costs and rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple pro­duc­tion process also sug­gest fun­gal leather may be an attrac­tive sus­tain­able mate­r­i­al for small­er busi­ness­es and design­ers to work with.

2. Pineapple ‘leather’

Since its launch in Decem­ber 2014, Piña­tex has gone from an inno­v­a­tive nat­ur­al tex­tile to a pro­lif­ic leather alter­na­tive. Made from waste pineap­ple leaf fibres, it’s now used by more than 1,000 brands world­wide, includ­ing Paul Smith, Hugo Boss and H&M, for cloth­ing and footwear, and by Hilton Hotels for soft fur­nish­ings.

Piña­tex was invent­ed by Dr Car­men Hijosa, who had the idea while con­sult­ing in the Philip­pines dur­ing the 1990s. There, she wit­nessed the envi­ron­men­tal impact of mass leather pro­duc­tion and chem­i­cal tan­ning, but also noticed the use of woven plant fibres in tra­di­tion­al gar­ments and the abun­dance of dis­card­ed pineap­ple leaves left after the fruit was har­vest­ed.

Hijosa quit her job and did a PhD to devel­op a sus­tain­able tex­tile and scal­able sup­ply chain from that wastage. Of that deci­sion, she says: “Design is not just about prod­uct. Design is about respon­si­bil­i­ty.”

After the pineap­ple har­vest, the long fibres from the fruit’s leaves are extract­ed, then washed and dried by the sun, or in dry­ing ovens dur­ing the rainy sea­son, to pro­duce a fluffy mate­r­i­al. This is mixed with a corn-based poly­lac­tic acid to cre­ate rolls of non-woven mesh which are shipped to Spain and Italy for fin­ish­ing.

Piña­tex has proven to be a ver­sa­tile nat­ur­al fibre with good strength and flex­i­bil­i­ty. It’s avail­able in a range of colours and fin­ish­es, includ­ing a water­proof ver­sion. On the down­side, the prod­uct isn’t yet 100 per cent biodegrad­able as it’s made from two dif­fer­ent mate­ri­als, 80 per cent pineap­ple leaf fibre, 20 per cent poly­lac­tic acid.

3. Lab-grown ‘leather’

Dr Chet­na Pra­jap­ati, lec­tur­er in tex­tiles with­in the cre­ative arts at Lough­bor­ough Uni­ver­si­ty, was award­ed a PhD for her work on biotech­nol­o­gy in tex­tile design. One of the emerg­ing sus­tain­able fibres she’s most excit­ed about is Zoa, a bio-based fab­ric made by US com­pa­ny Mod­ern Mead­ow.

Zoa is cre­at­ed in a lab by using the DNA of yeast to make col­la­gen, in a sim­i­lar method to beer pro­duc­tion. This col­la­gen is then puri­fied and shaped to cre­ate a leather-like mate­r­i­al. “It’s a liq­uid,” says Pra­jap­ati. “So that allows you to be much more cre­ative in the process, in terms of mould­ing it. And you’re not cre­at­ing metres of fab­ric; it’s fab­ric with­out waste.

“Twen­ty years ago, peo­ple were say­ing this is the future; now we’re there. It’s just a case of scal­ing it up and try­ing to make it cost effec­tive and acces­si­ble.”

What excites Pra­jap­ati the most is the change she believes emerg­ing mate­ri­als such as Zoa will have on the mind­set of fash­ion design­ers, includ­ing her stu­dents.

“I think this is a great oppor­tu­ni­ty for them to re-eval­u­ate what they’re doing, to stop and think about the impact of the fibres they’re using,” she says. “There is def­i­nite­ly an increase in aware­ness, and the ones who are real­ly pas­sion­ate will embed these prin­ci­ples into their projects and use it as oppor­tu­ni­ty to make con­scious changes.”

4. Algae ‘cotton’

The Deep Green Biotech Hub at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy Syd­ney has the high­est con­cen­tra­tion of algae bio-sci­en­tists in the world. Their vision is to use algae, which absorbs car­bon diox­ide and pro­duces more than 50 per cent of the oxy­gen we breathe, to replace fos­sil fuels.

Dr Mark Liu is a fash­ion design­er col­lab­o­rat­ing with the hub to devel­op sus­tain­able tex­tiles made from micro-algae. “Algae is full of cel­lu­lose [cot­ton is 99 per cent cel­lu­lose] and it’s under our noses,” he says. “Micro-algae dou­ble in bio­mass in 24 hours, com­pared to cot­ton plants which take 100 days. We could be grow­ing it in the sea instead of on arable land.”

Unlike algae which actu­al­ly puri­fies water as it grows, cot­ton pro­duc­tion is linked to water con­t­a­m­i­na­tion and it requires huge amounts of water to grow.

The use of algae in the fash­ion indus­try is still in its infan­cy. It’s being used as a cot­ton sub­sti­tute in a biodegrad­able t‑shirt by Volle­bak, com­bined with pulped euca­lyp­tus and beech.

AlgiKnit has received seed fund­ing to weave kelp fibres for use in footwear and fash­ion design­er Char­lotte McCur­dy has made a water-resis­tant rain­coat from algae.

“It’s still the very ear­ly stage,” says Liu, but he sees algae’s poten­tial as vast. “You can have cot­ton replace­ments, but you can also replace poly­ester by grow­ing algae as a lipid. Every­one is try­ing to find the algae that does the best job for the thing we’ve used before,” he says.

5. Orange ‘silk’

At the lux­u­ry end of the spec­trum, Orange Fiber chan­nels Italy’s high-fash­ion her­itage and Sicily’s his­toric orange indus­try by spin­ning cit­rus waste into a silk-like sus­tain­able tex­tile. The busi­ness was found­ed in 2014 by Adri­ana San­tanoc­i­to, who stud­ied fash­ion design at AFOL Moda in Milan, and lat­er patent­ed a method for extract­ing cel­lu­lose from orange pulp and turn­ing it into a silk-like yarn.

Accord­ing to Orange Fiber, Italy pro­duces 700,000 tonnes of cit­rus by-prod­ucts a year, which proves dif­fi­cult to dis­pose of. By upcy­cling these nat­ur­al fibres, the com­pa­ny helps alle­vi­ate this waste bur­den, while cater­ing to con­sumers who are increas­ing­ly look­ing at the envi­ron­men­tal impact of the clothes they wear. The com­pa­ny also hopes its tex­tile will spark new con­ver­sa­tions around sus­tain­abil­i­ty in the fash­ion indus­try.

Orange “silk” has a soft, light­weight feel and is biodegrad­able, though the fab­ric can also be blend­ed with oth­er mate­ri­als. Sal­va­tore Fer­rag­amo was the first fash­ion house to use Orange Fiber fab­rics through­out their col­lec­tion in 2017 and in 2019 Orange Fiber pro­duced a col­lec­tion with H&M Con­scious, the Swedish brand’s sus­tain­able fash­ion line.