Dress made of living mycelium can renew and repair itself
dezeen.com71 points by speckx 4 hours ago
71 points by speckx 4 hours ago
I wonder if there is a health hazard wearing this due to breathing in spores or toxins released into the air? Or perhaps there is a risk that the wearer will absorb harmful chemicals secreted by the mycelium via contact with the wearer's skin? Very interesting none the less. I have imagined humans making living clothes for a long time, so it is nice to see that idea materialize.
"Following drying at 45 degrees, the material is not quite living and not quite dead, but instead in a "low-metabolic, dormant-like state", Li told Dezeen, meaning it is not actively growing."
Don't think spores will be an issue since it's not the mycelium's sex organ mushroom that you're thinking of
It depends on the species. Some fungi like molds do directly sporulate from the mycelium.
Some people are very allergic to mushrooms. I wonder if that would extend to this.
But it's pretty cool.
> Or perhaps there is a risk that the wearer will absorb harmful chemicals secreted by the mycelium via contact with the wearer's skin?
Or just getting a bad itch.
The claim in the article that saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewer's yeast) naturally produced the deep blue color in the butterfly example is not actually true, although it's a gorgeous effect.
These are genetically engineered variants of brewer's yeast designed to produce pigments.
Wow you weren’t kidding that’s a beautiful color
You can buy this color for 3€/meter at any weekend fabric market.
You could, but getting it from pigments in a chitinous matrix produced by genetically engineered brewer's yeast is just a little bit cooler.
Neat. Wearing some hibernating Cordyceps clothes seems like a good way to speedrun some life-imitates-art The Last of Us gain of function research.
I would buy one, but I don’t think I have mushroom in my wardrobe for it.
Cordyceps, huh? An interesting choice! And ironically the subject of an article on Ars Technica that just dropped...
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/parasitic-zombie-fun...
Mr Stamets (both real AND fictional) must be proud as heck!
This would turn into a mould infested nightmare
How does it smell though?
I didn’t think of the smell at all, I was wondering what the feel was like. There’s a certain level of comfort that’s expected from clothing that matters. There’s also the question of breathability. Is it going to trap sweat and smells like polyester clothing?
Most people associate mushrooms and fungi with the smell of their substrate; they commonly don't have a strong smell themselves
I doubt it has a smell stronger than the wearer
edit: this is a bad take, upon further research
The mushroom smell isn't from either the substrate or respiration. That distinct odor is 1-octen-3-ol. Biochemists call it "mushroom alcohol." It's caused by enzymatic breakdown of their cell walls, and it thought to be related to signalling.
I doubt it would be strongly present here. The article says the mycelium are close to dormant.
You can actually purchase mushroom alcohol commercially as a food additive.
Chanterelles smell great. I would wear something that smelled like that.
Pine mushrooms, not so much.
I've done cultures on agar agar and mycelium definitely does have a distinctive smell. To me it's reminiscent to the damp smell of a concrete basement, though less stale and unpleasant.
Is there a possibility of the organisms escaping the material and infesting the environment? That's what I would worry about with mycelium.
Could they make a house out of this?
It doesn't seem to have the rigidity to be structurally sound for construction.
my tent material doesn't have rigidity to it either. if we change out the word "house", it could be an interesting material to play with for other types of shelter. it's supposed to be hydrophobic, but how hydrophobic? a light spritz or spilled drink or holds up in the rain?
Is there an adjective for something that's nifty but also gross?
I'm not sure it's any more objectively gross than normal textile materials. Imagine you lived in a hairless, furless world where nothing like wool was a thing, and then suddenly we discovered a weird fluffy mammal that extruded long fibers out of its flesh; the people of that world might call that gross, we'd just call it ordinary.
Okay, but that is gross! We're just desensitized to it, and we had a practical survival reason to initially overcome any aversion to cloaking ourselves in animal hair, until it became ingrained in human culture from birth. This isn't really making a compelling case to overcome a new aversion to something gross...
> nutrient solution is applied over a hole, along with a small patch of fresh fungus
So, not repair itself.
Exactly. You can place a patch with some glue over a hole in fabric to achieve the same thing in a traditional garment. Iron-on repair patches are also similar.
It's one thing to say "get it wet and leave it in the sun". It's another thing to require identical replacement material and nutrient slurry (I don't know about you, but I think I can source fabric glue more easily than potato water).
To be fair it only claimed "near self-repairing".
One could think of it as mostly self-repairing with some outside encouragement.
Does the fresh fungus need to be genetically identical? I read something about mycelial nuclei in high school and it was weird.
I guess they're just trying to get the networks to interlace, not to reconstitute into a single organism and be capable of nutrient exchange, so I don't think it matters if they're identical or not.
Pretty disgusting tbh.