The Genius Behind Fashion's Most Promising Material
The material scientist who has invented the moonshot fashion desperately needs
It was the Biofabricate Summit in Paris last week, which is to material scientists what Paris couture is to Middle Eastern heiresses. Serious business. It’s where the wizards of biotechnology come together to showcase the groundbreaking developments fashion is hoping will one day reduce its dependance on fossil fuels and animal materials.
Like a Willy Wonka chocolate factory of fantastical inventions, Vivobarefoot unveiled their 3D on demand printing technology for footwear; Balenciaga showcased their overcoat made from mycellium and a nanocellulose found in plant cell walls. Gucci showed off their new Rhyton sneaker and revamped Horsebit 1955 bag made from Demetra, a leather alternative composed of up to 77 percent plants.
Also there was Bloom, a company who use protein engineering to turn nature's waste proteins into fibres "as soft as cashmere, as fine as silk and as functional as polyester". And Pneuma, who unveiled an actual living material that practises photsynthesis as you wear it, capturing CO2 while releasing oxygen.
It’s an exciting world, but it’s also fraught with frustration. Not everything lives up to its promises, not everything can be made at a competitive price and not everything will scale. While some things look shiny from the outside, behind the curtain the wizardry may just be a clever trick. Investors have been caught before pouring money into the Holy Grails of material alternatives, only for those companies to fail, (poor old Bolt Threads). Victims of their own hype, the excitement surrounding cactus, pineapple and mushroom leather has been premature. Leather alternatives almost always require a plastic or polyurethane backing to be robust enough to perform, and processing and production methods can be heavy on impact. We are absolutely on the verge of a materials revolution, but only a handful will save the day.
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There’s one company, however, that consistently crops up in sustainable solutions. It is the Ilinois based Natural Fibre Welding, (NFW), founded by chemist Luke Haverhals and his CTO Aaron Amstutz. NFW has pioneered a remarkable family of biomaterials that can match leather, and many other synthetics, without any petrochemical inputs at all. The technology is called Mirum and it can make everything from shoes and handbags to car seats and yoga mats. Mirum, NFW hope, will “create a fully circular, holistically sustainable, low-carbon material economy from the ground up.”
Luke thinks he has the moonshot solution - and over 70 brands have now collaborated with him who think so too. Pangaia, Stella McCartney, Ralph Lauren, All Birds, Camper and IWC to name a few. The problem? Money.
“Unfortunately, large investments have been made in ideas that never had a chance of scaling or solving problems,” Luke tells me over Zoom from NFW HQ. “Investors are feeling burned because they were told fanciful stories about how a mushroom or biotechnology could do it all - they were fed fairytales that aren’t true. And now, they’re gun shy”.
Let’s start with the problem NFW is trying to solve. Plastic, Luke points out, dominates the world because “that sector has had all money for the last 100 years. Over that time they have given trillions of dollars to chemists with the express purpose of making synthetic polymers out of fossil fuel waste.” Those chemists have been very successful: plastic is an extraordinary material. “You can mould and shape plastics into anything, it is stiff and strong, or it can be flexible.” It’s also incredibly cheap.
NFW love the promise of plastic, they just wanted to make it differently. “What if we can mould and shape nutrients to do that stuff, instead of petroleum?” Luke references his mother in their farm kitchen, whom he watched as a little boy turning nutrients from the garden into culinary delights. “When my mom made me a ham sandwich she never said ‘I know you like a bitter taste in your sandwich, I’ll put some cyanide in there.’ No, she put in horseradish, which is a nutrient that achieves the same taste.”
Nature, Luke says, is full of abundant, diverse and redundant ingredients that perform as well if not better than synthetics. The problem is chemists have spent the last 80 years thinking not about how to make waste wood, cork or rice husks into effective and efficient materials, but the waste products of oil. (Fun fact: the most abundant food on the planet is rice; the husk is the bit you remove to get to the grain and at the moment, it is just treated as waste. “There’s more tonnage of rice husks produced in the world each year than the entire tonnage of all synthetics that go into fashion industry,” says Luke. I have absolutely no way of checking if this is true, but there you go.)
“Nature builds complex, high performance things like trees or my own body via a system of nutrients primarily put together by photosynthesis.” Photosynthesis, Luke asserts, is the definition of how to avoid toxicity: “nutrients like cellulose, lignum, rubber and veggy oils are wildly abundant and are the building blocks of life. Nature already has a system that knows how to break down the building blocks of life and rebuild them. That is nature’s circular economy and it happens around us every single day.”
So, can NFW harness the genius of nature to knock plastics out the park? “There’s more than $100trillion dollars invested in petro infrastructure that makes plastics possible. A little company in Illinois has to have a product that is so astoundingly good that it scales, hits cost points and performs comparably to the $100trillion infrasructure of the petrol chemical industry.” It’s David and Goliath.
When I spoke to Luke just before Christmas he was psyched by a huge deal with BMW to replace leather with Mirum, in all their cars. Fashion is already all over him: the world’s first biodegradable sneaker by Unless Collective was comprised mostly of Mirum and his Clarus, Pliant and Ternera technologies (iterations of Mirum that allow for foam and finishing solutions).
“Like dough can make bread and crackers, Mirum is a pluri-potent material that can be used on its own or laminated on top of another fabric so you can make choices of woven or knit. Clarus can be a backing fabric that wicks moisture, and because it’s made of veggy oils is a natural barrier to moisture - oil and water don’t mix. So it will act like a raincoat. We can create tiny perforations in the material for breathability. So now it’s waterproof, moisture wicking and breathable all at the same time.” Goodbye nylon, Goretex, polyester, acrylic.
Mirum also comes on a roll so you can make millions of square feet of material in whatever shape you like, much more efficient than a cow hide. It can be engineered to be thick and thin, to stretch even. Goodbye Lycra, Elastene and Spandex.
Over 1500 brands have reached out to NFW, Luke says his team is fielding 100 new enquiries a month. Every brand in the world wants (and needs to be) petrochemical free. “On the other hand investors are having a hard time financing our growth,” says Luke incredulously. “And some fashion brands are having a hard time interacting with us as our network of production is not yet built into a sufficient supply chain. It takes time and money to get to the next level of growth. We need a few million dollars in order to start doing phenomenal deliveries.”
This is the new green economy. This is the fertile ground for partnership and innovation that Diana Verde Nieto was talking about in last week’s post. The difficult sustainable bit has been done: “For all of our materials we ask - does it start well, does it stay clean and can it end well? If you can start with things that are part of nature’s natural circle, if you don’t make them toxic while you’re manufacturing them, then they can end back with nature.” Now we just have to get them out there. Over to you, Finance People.
If you would like to come to a lovely breakfast at Koko in Camden I’m hosting with Positive Luxury founder Diana Verde Nieto next week, please hop below the paywall below for details.
Until next week,
Tiff