This week, Erek Vaehne takes us into the fabric potential of mushrooms.
MUSHROOMS: The technical process of making fabric from fungus or mushrooms is known as bio-fabrication. This process is basically making the fabric from the growing part of microorganisms like mushroom root. However, the interesting thing is that this process has shown the relationship between fashion and biology, and how fashion comes very close to biology. For lab production, different treatments (like lighting, temperature, humidity, essential oils & other organic techniques) have to be applied for the nutrition and growth of the mushrooms with the help of a petri dish. After 2-3 weeks, they are ready for harvest and marinated with another liquid, and then taken out and placed in the circular 3D-shaped mold. And eventually, through drying, they are transformed into garments. The advantage of this ‘MycoTex’ fabric is that the garment is made without sewing. So, this process can reduce production time and cost. Different fungus mycelium can give different appearances and hand feels for the resulting products. This eco-friendly mushroom fiber has some unique properties that are not found in other sustainable fibers. Some of its notable features are:
1) Fabric made from the mushroom fiber is non-toxic, waterproof and fire resistant.
2) Clothing made from this fiber is very thin, flexible and comfortable to wear.
3) The ingredients made from this fiber are antimicrobial and suitable for sensitive skin.
4) Mushroom fabric is strong, breathable and durable.
5) Requires less water for production.
6) It is an environmentally friendly and 100% biodegradable fiber.
So there was this one autumn when food was scarce and I ended up making a lot of bad choices about toadstools. Hunger doesn’t lend itself to being sensible. I ate grass. I ate things I found on the beach – we all did that. I ate all the kinds of seaweed that everyone agrees really aren’t for eating even if you boil them for a week. I wandered about in the woods and I found some toads, and some toadstools, and something green and yellow that might have been snakes, or eels. I don’t know how you tell.
It’s not a certainty it was the toadstools. I ended up with the overwhelming urge to make trousers. I had very strong feelings about the things I was supposed to make trousers out of – toadstools featured heavily, as did moonlight, seaweed and some rather sinister flowers that I thought better of putting in the toad, toadstool and maybe snake stew. It would be fair to say that as trousers, they failed to perform many of the key functions associated with that kind of garment.
I’m not sure it mattered. Not given what happened at the library, which we do not speak of, to protect the guilty. As hunger-induced madness goes, it was fairly mild.