The Future of Fashion – Made from Mushrooms | Dan Widmaier | TED

I'm a proud lifelong nerd,

and I have a PhD in chemistry and chemical biology to prove it,

which is why I never thought I'd be that guy standing up here,

talking about my love affair with fashion.

(Laughter)

And there's someone else in my life

who's equally shocked by this turn of events,

and that's my wonderful wife,

who literally has a degree in fashion.

(Laughter)

But here I am, standing with these two wallets.

One of these is made out of leather,

one of these is made out of mushrooms.

And I'm not going to tell you which one is which.

The average consumer can't tell you the difference --

kind of the whole point.

Because even if you hate fashion,

you've got an entire room in your house devoted to it.

It's called your closet.

And your closet is full of all kinds of materials --

cotton, leather, nylon, polyester --

that list goes on and on.

And those materials matter,

because those materials are the reason

fashion is in the midst of a sustainability crisis.

This is an industry that makes 100 billion plus items per year.

When I started my journey, I thought this was going to be a really easy answer.

We just consume less,

we have fewer, better things.

But in the last decade,

I've come to believe that ignores fundamental realities

of both fashion and human nature.

You see, fashion is not purely functional.

It's about confidence, creativity, self-expression.

It's a pure reflection of our innate desire, as humans,

to always want more.

And it satisfies our insatiable appetites

to discover, buy, collect, show off.

In truth, fashion is intrinsic to who we are.

There is a piece of good news, though.

We can make fashion sustainable,

and we're going to do it with science,

and we're going to do it not by changing the humans,

but by changing those materials themselves.

And lucky for us,

the answers to all of fashion's materials problems

are available today, out there in nature,

and it's our job, as scientists,

to go find the best inventions

from nature's four-billion-year catalog of greatest hits

and bring them to the world of design.

So I started a PhD,

and I actually fell in love with one of these materials from nature.

And it's this -- it's spider silk.

It's this fine, elegant, tough fiber that spiders make.

You've probably seen a Spider-Man movie, you know.

You may have wanted to make Peter Parker's web slinger.

It's OK -- I did, too; it's badass.

I wanted to recreate that material in a lab,

so I started a company, and we did just that.

And the very first product we made was this:

a tie.

I took the very first tie, and I sent it to Stan Lee himself,

cocreator of Spider-Man, idol to nerds around the planet,

all-around amazing human.

And he loved it.

He actually cold-called my phone from a blocked number,

and we geeked out over the technology.

And back in those days,

almost nobody was working on sustainable materials in fashion.

So I excitedly ran off to go talk to designers and fashion executives.

And they thought this was fine, cool,

but they couldn't shut up about their problem with leather.

And for really good reason.

Leather is one of the most pivotal materials in the fashion world.

In 2020 alone, the five biggest European luxury houses

sold over 50 billion dollars of leather goods.

And the challenge with leather

is that today, it's inextricably linked to raising cows,

and not just a few -- like, lots of cows.

And cows, at the global scale, are terrible for our environmental future.

And so I left this conversation thinking,

"OK, what makes leather leather?"

And the truth is,

nobody loves leather because it comes from a cow.

We love it because it's strong, it's soft, it's beautiful.

It plays from the runway in Paris to a rodeo in Texas.

So if we can take cows out of the equation,

what's the thing we have to replicate to make a great material like leather?

And the answer is microstructure.

So this is a microscope image of the collagen in cowhide.

And it looks like a mess,

it's just this jumble of fibers mixed together.

At its essence, that structure is why leather is both pliable and strong.

Now, contrast that to your closet.

All those materials are what we call knits or wovens.

They look like this under a microscope.

Essentially, you take a single thread, and you loop it around itself,

or you crisscross it over itself, and you make a fabric.

If we want to make a new material

with the same amazing properties as leather,

we need to go out and find a natural material

with the same microstructure as the collagen in cowhide.

Now, my brain gets going with this,

and I think, "OK, we can grow skin, we can grow pure collagen,

we can use plant fibers ..."

Those all fail.

Quality, cost or scalability reasons tank those ideas.

And that's what brought me to the world of fungi.

I'm going to assume you all know what mushrooms are.

I'm going to show you some mushrooms on the side of a dead tree.

And I'm much more interested in what's happening

just beneath the surface.

Inside that tree are millions of stringy little strands

that are called mycelium,

that are eating away at it.

They look like this.

So you see those white fibrous roots underneath the mushroom --

those are mycelium.

They’re these long branch networks.

And what they're doing is eating dead stuff in the soil

and releasing nutrients to the mushroom and to the ecosystem around it.

And so now, I'm going to show you side by side.

Collagen on the left, mycelium on the right.

We're looking at microstructure;

I'm saving you six years of getting a PhD.

(Laughter)

We're on to something here.

But to pull this off,

we need to do this at the scale of fashion.

We need a lot of mycelium. Not a lab, but a factory.

So that's exactly what we did.

So here, what you're seeing is our first factory,

and you're seeing rows and rows of pure mycelium

growing in these trays.

And those mycelium are eating leftover sawdust,

so they're doing what fungi do best in nature --

they eat something nobody wants, and they turn it into something useful.

And instead of growing into the soil,

these mycelium are growing up in these big puffy clouds

that we can easily harvest.

And this is where science has to meet design.

We take that material and turn it into something leatherlike.

It has to be beautiful, has to be functional.

And designers need to be able to easily incorporate it

into the world of fashion products.

The first prototypes were none of those things.

But after many thousands of iterations,

we have a material, and we call it Mylo.

And Mylo does everything we set out for it.

It's beautiful, it's functional,

but most importantly, it's sustainable.

So when you grow mushrooms,

it takes about a little under one square meter of land

to grow one kilogram of mushrooms.

Contrast that to cows --

takes about 97 square meters of land to grow one kilogram of cow.

And when we're growing Mylo,

we're doing this in high-density vertical agriculture,

and we power it with 100 percent renewable energy.

And this is technology.

We're constantly getting better. Contrast that to the cow.

It's about as good as it's going to get,

and the cows really don't like it

when you stack them up in high-density vertical agriculture.

And so the question remains:

How are we going to distribute this material at global scale

to meet the moment?

I have bad news for you here.

Historically, it takes decades

for a new material to reach global-scale adoption.

Take spandex, that stretchy fiber.

It's in your blue jeans, your yoga pants.

Makes your butt look amazing.

That material was invented in the 1950s,

and it wasn't until the athleisure megatrend 50 years later

that it was truly everywhere on this planet.

And thank you, climate change --

we humans don't have 50 years to wait.

We need to solve this problem.

We need new materials, and we need them now.

And this is where fashion can be transformational.

So I went out and constructed what we call the Mylo Consortium.

These are fashion brands you know.

Stella McCartney, lululemon, Kering and Adidas.

Normally, fashion brands are renowned for their competitive nature

and their desire for exclusivity.

But I was able to convince these brands

that no one group can solve this problem alone.

And to meet this moment,

it was time to act in collaboration instead of competition.

We did just that.

With the idea that we're going to solve this really big problem really fast.

And here's a taste of how they're supporting Mylo.

Lululemon wove Mylo into yoga and wellness accessories.

Celebrity environmentalist Paris Jackson

modeled Mylo in this fashion editorial.

Adidas redesigned the Stan Smith --

it's their most iconic style --

with Mylo.

And Stella McCartney designed the Frayme Mylo handbag,

and debuted it on the Paris runway.

And that little black handbag that you see right there,

that's now part of Stella's commercial collection.

And what that means is that this is not some far-off idea

that's a dream that may one day be real.

Mylo's commercially viable today.

We sell it for 30 dollars a square foot.

It's about the price of premium calf leather.

And this -- this is the tipping point.

This is the first tangible proof that the future of fashion

can and will be made with sustainable materials.

And this is our road map.

We went looking to nature for a better alternative to leather,

and we found that mycelium.

It was hiding in plain sight.

And this story, Mylo's story,

is just one small example in a much broader movement.

It's the one I know.

But in the last few years,

countless scientists have joined us

in this journey of a sustainable materials revolution.

And in the coming years,

I think we're going to see amazing advances

that replace all the harmful materials in your closet,

in your home and your car.

And my hope is that, by sharing this journey with Mylo,

it can act as a blueprint that these others can follow

to more quickly improve this world for all of us.

Because in my heart,

I'm still that nerd from the beginning,

and I want to know what else is hiding out there in nature.

I want to know what's the number-one spot

on the best-of playlist from four billion years of evolution.

And the incredible part of all this

is that fashion undoubtedly compounded our sustainability crisis.

But fashion has a golden opportunity to lead the charge,

to live with nature, instead of against it.

And now, and in the future,

fashion's not just about making yourself beautiful.

It's also about making this planet beautiful and livable for generations.

Thank you.

(Cheers and applause)