Technology

Mushroom leather is becoming a hot commodity for fashion brands looking for real leather alternatives.
Ecovative grows mycelium, the root structure of mushrooms, and turns it into products that can substitute for leather, as well as offerings in other sectors, like meat alternatives.
The team served as the initial supplier for Bolt Threads’s Mylo mushroom leather, which Stella McCartney piloted in a two-piece vegan collection earlier this year.
Myomi handbag made with mycelium “leather”.
Ecovative wants to become the first to offer a plant-based leather alternative that’s ready to scale, and could up the ante in fashion’s race for leather replacements that are both more sustainable and higher quality, with a more attractive look and feel, than plastic-based vegan materials.

To highlight sustainable and ethical substitutes for animal leather we’ve rounded up six materials that can rival its textural and performance qualities, from vegan pineapple leather to a leather alternative made of seafood shells.
2018 marked the first time the material wasn’t used by a single designer on the London Fashion Week line-up.
Below, we’ve rounded up six of these novel materials, which are hoping to give leather the boot.
Bio-leather by Shahar LivneDiscarded animal fat and bones from a slaughterhouse are tinted and plasticised using waste blood to create Israeli designer Shahar Livne’s bio-leather.
Created from mycelium, the branching filament structure that mushrooms and other fungi use to grow, the material reportedly consumes substantially less water than is needed to produce animal leather while emitting fewer greenhouse gases.