The Future of Fashion – Made from Mushrooms | Dan Widmaier | TED - 双语字幕
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 who's standing up here talking about my love affair with fashion.
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.
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 real.
Which the average consumer can't tell you the difference and that's kind of a whole point Because even if you hate fashion,
you've got an entire room in your house devoted to it.
It's called your clothes And your closet is full of all kinds of materials, cotton, leather, nylon, polyester, that list goes on and on.
And 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.
Now 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 desires, 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 going to do it with science,
and we're going to do it not by changing the humans,
but by changing those materials 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 4 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 those materials from nature.
And this, it's spider silk.
It's this fine, elegant, tough fiber that spiders make.
I mean you've probably seen a Spider-Man movie, you know.
You may have wanted to make Peter Parker's web slinger.
It's okay.
I 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.
And I took the very first tie, and I sent it to Stan Lee himself.
Co-creator 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, like cool, but they couldn't shut up about their problem with leather.
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 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 I left this conversation thinking, okay, what makes leather leather?
And the truth is, nobody loves leather because of it.
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 and cowhide.
And looks like a mess.
It's this jumble of fibers mixed together.
At its essence, that structure is why leather is both pliable and strong.
Contrast that to your closet, all those materials.
They're what we call nits or wovens.
They like this under a microscope.
Essentially, you take a single thread and loop it around itself or you criss-cross it over itself.
So, if we want to make a new material with the same amazing properties as leather, we
to go out in nature and find a natural material with the same microstructure as the collagen in cowhide.
Now, my brain gets going with this and I think, okay, 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,
so I'm going to assume you all know what mushrooms I'm going to 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 fruits, they're 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,
let's have a College it on the left, mycelium on the right, we're looking at microstructure, I'm saving you six years of getting a PhD.
We're on to something here.
But to pull this off, we need to do this at the scale of fashion.
So don't need a little mycelium, we need a lot, not a lab, but a factory.
So that's exactly what we did.
So what you're seeing is our factory, first factory.
And you're seeing rows and rows and rows of pure mycelium growing in these trays.
And 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.
You see, we need to that material and turn it into something leather-like.
It has to be beautiful, it to be functional.
And 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, many, many, many thousands of iterations, we have a material and we call And Milo does everything we set out for it.
It's 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 we're growing Milo, we're doing this in high density vertical agriculture and we power it with 100% renewable energy.
And this is technology.
We're constantly getting better.
Contrast after 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?
And I have bad news for you here.
Historically, it takes decades for a new material to reach global scale.
Take spandex.
Is that stretchy fiber?
It's in your blue jeans, your yoga pants.
Make sure 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 don't have 50 years to wait.
We to solve this problem.
We 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 Milo Consortium.
These are fashion brands you know.
Stella Lulu Lemon, Caring and Adidas.
And now normally fashion brands are like renowned for their competitive nature and their desire for exclusivity.
But I was able to come into 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 a taste of how they're supporting Milo.
Lulu Lemon wove Milo into yoga and wellness accessories.
Celebrity environmentalist Paris Jackson modeled Milo in this fashion editorial.
Adidos redesigned the Stan Smith.
It's their most iconic style.
With the and Stella McCartney designed the frame Milo 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.
Milo's commercially viable two day.
We sell it for $30 a square foot.
It's about the price of premium calf leather.
And this, this is the tipping point.
point.
This is the first tangible proof that the future of fashion can and will be made with sustainable materials.
And this is our roadmap.
We went looking to nature for a better alternative of the leather, and found that mycelium.
It hiding in plain sight.
And this Milo's story is just one small example in a much broader movement.
It's 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 Milo,
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 nature.
I want to know what's the number one spot on the best-of-play list 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.
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