THE FUTURE IS IN THE MAKING

Fashion is embracing circularity thanks to biomaterials: a playground for innovators. Their experiments are on display at Amsterdam’s Fashion for Good Museum until mid-2022, in a programme that is evolving with a scouting project for creatives. Titled Grow, the show offers a “taste” of the future, with some of the featured materials even originating from edible substances. The institution that launched the initiative gave us the low-down on the most promising developments.

Biomaterials are familiar in fields such as medicine, but the word has now been co-opted by the fashion industry to describe materials that are “biological in origin and, as with nature, circular by design”. So says Fashion for Good, a platform for sustainable innovation, which explained to us how this area of research is promising positive changes for clothing: “When you think of biomaterials in garments, probably the first things that come to mind are cotton, hemp and linen, but this world is way bigger and always evolving. Recent developments are using fruit skins (from waste), mycelium (fungus roots) or even algae, spider and caterpillar silk, cellulosics (from plants and trees) and bioplastics.” As for the categorisation of biomaterials, they tell us: “The taxonomy is ever-changing as new innovations arise. Many biomaterials fit into conventional categories such as natural fibres, man-made cellulosic fibres and biosynthetics (artificially made from bio-based resources). But not all of the new inventions can be classified in these groups. There may be no box to put them in yet, or they might belong to multiple typologies.” Here are some examples of the most pioneering biomaterials – as well as the companies behind them – selected by the Dutch institution.