Stella McCartney announced Tuesday that it plans to remove leather from its arsenal of designs. Instead, the brand looks to… mushrooms! Hey, that’s a first.
On Instagram, the brand teased a piece from the collection of mushroom leather designs. The material, dubbed Mylo, is made from mycelium, A.K.A. the root structure of the fungus. After first showing a handbag made from the stuff at an exhibit in 2018, Vogue reports that Stella McCartney has finally finished a working prototype of the material.
Cool stuff.
According to the brand, the funding for Mylo came from other retailers like Kering, Adidas, and Lululemon. McCartney told the magazine: “We’d already done a bag, so I wanted to do the ready-to-wear to give a bit more insight into how much you can do with this material, and how it can be swept across the industry to actually replace leather.” The first outing for Mylo is a pair of pants and a Mylo “un-leather” (I’ll have to get used to saying this, won’t I) bustier. During production, mycellium is formed on a sheet of sawdust over two weeks, after which the proprietary material is tanned like animal leather, giving it the look and feel of traditional leather goods. Stella McCartney also claims it is biodegradable, as well.
Click through here for lots of images of the stuff, modeled by Paris Jackson in a forest, because it’s all organic—get it? Of the material’s future, McCartney tells Vogue: “Right now, this could still be seen as a marketing tool. Whether it will grow into the bulk of how [these brands] make their money is the question. So there’s still a lot of work to be done.”