Designer Suzanne Lee shares her experiments in growing a kombucha-based
material that can be used like fabric or vegetable leather to make
clothing. The process is fascinating, the results are beautiful, though
there's still one minor drawback... Suzanne directs the BioCouture research project, which sprang from an idea in her book Fashioning the Future: Tomorrow’s Wardrobe,
a seminal text on fashion and future technologies. Her research
harnesses nature to propose a radical future fashion vision: Can we grow
a dress from a vat of liquid? Using bacterial-cellulose, Lee
aims to address pressing ecological and sustainability issues around
fashion and beyond. A Senior Research Fellow at Central Saint Martins,
University of the Arts London, she is working with scientists to
investigate whether synthetic biology can engineer optimized organisms
for growing future consumer product. biocouture.co.uk