The British designer Stella McCartney aims at new fabrics, once again made in the name of sustainability
“We do not have to consider garments as waste material, but rather, the client must learn to change their attitude and understand what lies behind each garment”.
It was underlined by Claire Bergkamp, Stella McCartney‘s worldwide director of sustenaibility and innovation, one of the very first brands to make sustainability its distinctive feature.
And thanks to the new technologies, it is developing some important innovations in terms of materials, including vegan silk and the Mylo bag, which is very similar to the skin, but realized through a special mushroom: the Mycelio.
It is an entirely renewable material, with a low content of “gray” energy and compostable on a domestic scale, obtained by developing mycelium, a formation corresponding to the “roots” of the mushrooms, on a substratum formed by waste from agricultural production.
The material to which Stella McCartney is thinking is made up of non-edible agricultural products such as plant stems and seed shells. This material is bound and compacted by the growth of mycelium, which takes place in 5-7 days, in the dark and without watering or using petroleum products. In practice the mycelium acts as a self-assembling natural polymer.
The final treatment in the oven eliminates living matter, preventing the degradation of the material up to the time of composting. By varying the raw material it is possible to obtain products of different strength, texture and appearance.
