Suzanne Lee: Grow Own Your Clothes

Imagine you can make your own clothing made from organic materials, such as bacteria, fermented tea, yeast and other organisms. Which can be change the organic materials into environmentally friendly fibers. This is exactly what fashion designer Suzanne Lee pioneered. She investigated the possibility of creating clothing through the use of microbial cellulose, for this research project, Lee coined the term Bioucouture.

“Biocouture started as an academic research project , the result of conversation I had with biologist while researching my book. My original question was “how else can we create materials for sustainable future?” Susanne Lee. So, she explores how bacteria could be harnessed to produce fabrics for use as clothing.

In the interview, she says “if you rethink how you make a create piece clothing, you could imagine growing a dress in a vat of liquid using bacteria”. She showed an example of fashion made from organic material, a shirt from organic material, which produced by bacteria in a vat of liquid to produce bacterial cellulose. a material that has similar properties with the leather.

We could use a microbe to synthezise cellulose , rather than using a plant to grow a fiber or sintetic fiber. Clothes made from polyster, nylon, canvas, leather, etc will be so wasted if we’re bored and didn’t use it again. With biology we can engineer new performance functionally and aesthetic qualities. At this point, they are still not processing the bacteria to produce the desired material, but in the future of human can design thes bacteria to produce the desired quality.

Fashion made from organic materials such as belonging to suzanne lee has the possibility of a crowded market because the materials used are derived from renewable materials and is easy to propagate. So this project can be used as a solution for the apparel industry in the world to be more varied source material.