Interspecies fashion. Designing and dialoguing with fungi
Fungi, in their controversial cultural and biological role, become mediators in an interspecies shift in fashion design practices. Their growing application for industrial experimentation, art, visual communication, and literature, mark an ontological turn. They symbolise the possibility to reconfigure the ecosystemic balance in today’s dangerously anthropized world. Capable to overcome issues linked to sustainable production, consumption, and to guide towards a renewed human-non-human bound.
National
Italy
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It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
Fungi, in their controversial cultural and biological role, become mediators in an interspecies shift in fashion design practices. Their growing application for industrial experimentation, art, visual communication and literature, mark in fact an ontological turn. As a consequence, they come to symbolise the possibility to reconfigure the ecosystemic balance in a dangerously anthropized world, through specific modes of action and interaction. Capable to overcome issues connected to sustainable production, consumption, and to guide towards the reappropriation of nature's primitive human-non-human bound. This phenomenon is explored through the development of a series of workshops and a curatorial project.
fungi
biomaterials
interspecies
fashion
curatorial project
The overall concept of the project, meant to be articulated in a series of design workshops and in a curatorial project, starts from the analysis about the use of bio-based materials made of fungi for fashion application. Such a challenge is taking place – receiving increasing attention - within industrial, semi-industrial, and artistic experimentation. Both in the form of faux leather made of mycelium (the rooting part of the fungi) or muskin (the fruit or mushroom of a parasitic fungi), fungi appear to represent a more sustainable material alternative. Developed in highly innovative research-led environments, such materials are characterised by a short supply chain, and are mostly made of 100% natural biomass. These materials, not yet fully exploited, are mainly used in the realisation of brands’ limited edition collections, or by emerging brands. As a result, they also inspire more conscious consuming patterns. In the case of muskin, it also challenges fashion’s commercial paradigm. Muskin nurtures a regime of fluctuating free market, whereby these mushrooms are unpredictably collected and monetized, going against the logic of the ‘fashion seasons’. Thus, enhancing the work of smaller local producers and artisans.
The project emerges in parallel to my PhD research at Università Iuav di Venezia, and involves the R&D centre Pangaia Grado Zero who patented muskin. To make the project participatory, at its early stage it included a workshop held at Iuav with a group of Master students. It focused on collaboration and interdisciplinarity, mixing design and science methodologies. The didactic experience is framed in a posthuman and new materialist philosophical perspective, useful to comprehend the meaning, potential, and obstacles of an interspecies design approach. To this extent, it invited its participants to collectively design a fashion concept until the prototypes, but also to take care of a personal mycelium cultivation that was provided. The former aspect is significant in the activation of an attitude on the model of the rooting collaborative system, the latter, to test and raise awareness on the human-non-human affective relationship. The cultivations’ reports are intended to understand the influence of fungi on the relationship of care with the project. The workshop stands for a prototype meant to be re-proposed among different environments and targets. For this reason, some qualitative observations have also been collected by sharing materials with high school classes, professionals, and professors from different fields.
A big challenge for the application of fungi, specifically muskin, in fashion is their strong aesthetic connotation. Reason why it was important, prior and subsequently to the workshop, to administer surveys in order to test participants’ primary knowledge, visual, sensorial perception of the material, and general impression on fungal entities. At this first stage, the aesthetic outcomes were interesting to outline a possible scenario of items and corresponding imaginaries. Many projects and prototypes evoke realities in-between the primitive and the technological, the past and the future; recalling again the controversy inherent in mushrooms’ nature.
The invitation to think with and as fungi, through workshops and an exhibition project, guides to engage more as collaborative entities and less as individuals. Inclusion is achieved by inspiring a return to proximity with nature. We live in an epoch that the ecological philosopher Albrecht (2019) defines as “solastalgia”, an era marked by strong individual experiences in facing climate crisis and where, by contrast, many primitive emotions are resurfacing. These are the so-called “psychoterratic” emotions, or “eco-emotions”. Consequently, in order to alleviate the pathologies of our century, Albrecht replaces the term Anthropocene with that of “Symbiocene”: an invitation for humanity to reconcile the separation between man and nature. Similarly the anthropologist Guzy (2021) illustrates eco-cosmologies as the key to finding local solutions for a global sustainable world. These indigenous worldviews relate human, cosmos, and non-human, and are often transmitted through shamanic dreams and ritual practices. Exploiting fungi’s peculiar characteristic of holding together two contrasting natures and languages, one scientific and one animistic, they appear capable mediators in committing to cultural sustainability. This discourse is linked to the thoughts of Smelik (2022) on “sustainability as ethic of care”. Idea that sees in the use of new materials a way to guarantee higher quality of life on Earth. Scientific papers remark the association of fungi as beneficial in medicinal, diets, and cosmetics. Even if these properties are not yet related to their application for fashion purposes, it is certainly eye-opening to foresee their potential. In conclusion, the integration of fungi into our lives thanks to the pervasive and anticipatory jargon of fashion, may make an interspecies scenario come true. Whereby fungi come to play a central role in all aspects of the sustainable transition (design, production, consumption, communication) by holding biodiversity together.
During the research I came across the large mycological herbarium housed at Giancarlo Ligabue Museum of Natural History in Venice, however, there are no historical traces regarding the collecting of mushrooms for aesthetic purposes; as instead happened in the Victorian age for plants such as algae and ferns – hence the so-called “pteridomania”. Historically, there is not even evidence of a particular interest in the iconographic reproduction of this theme in the arts and in fashion. A rather unique case is a selection of Gucci printed silk scarves designed by Accornero, respectively “Funghi” (1967), “The Four Seasons” (1960-70), “Squares” (1970). Nonetheless, fungi today seem to be the protagonists of a nascent craze. Numerous events and sources report how since 2021 we are witnessing a real obsession with fungi, in all their forms and uses. Social media and magazines, but also calls for papers and academic conferences, offer content related to this theme. In this panorama, the research project’s concept offers the possibility of hybridising varied fields, such as fashion studies and mycology, resulting in an attempt to revisit both academic and anthropological hierarchies. One way to bring the language of science into common language, opening up to a new form of knowledge creation and sharing.
“Interspecies fashion. Designing and dialoguing with fungi” is inspired by a vision of coexistence of species, on the complementarity of technologies and rituals. The project blurs the dichotomies of culture-nature, human-non-human. It will continue to grow, but the lack of funding risks limiting it to a theoretical or prototype stage. The New European Bauhaus Prize 2023 represents the possibility to amplify connections with local or national communities of designers, mycologists, cultural Institutions, companies, and researchers, is nodal to the development of the investigation, and to further test this new form of symbiosis between humans and fungi.
At the moment, the main stakeholders involved are Università Iuav di Venezia (Venice) and the R&D centre Pangaia Grado Zero (Florence). The last, among other materials, patented mushroom-based muskin. The ultimate goal is to not only use muskin, but to also identify and involve a stakeholder dealing with mycelium. Moreover, noticed the general curiosity and sensitivity that emerged from the people inside and outside the project, the idea is to find more occasions and targeted support to repropose the workshop format in collaboration with design experts from the field, and to open it to a wider public in various environments. Another goal of the project, given the positive feedbacks from local cultural Institutions, is to receive funding that would enable the development of a complete curatorial project. A dialogue has been initiated with Giancarlo Ligabue Museum of Natural History in Venice, since they host a wide and historical mycological herbarium. Primary contacts have also started with MUSE Museum of Sciences in Trento, who also hosts a collection of mushrooms, and whose directive team showed interest to develop a form of collaboration.
The project aims to install an interdisciplinary dialogue from a fashion theory and design perspective. In this context, interdisciplinarity has to be distinguished by multidisciplinarity in the same way that I will use the term interspecies instead of multispecies. Interspecies is defined in biology as a relationship between organisms belonging to different species that share the same ecosystem, while multispecies indicates something that is aimed at multiple species. The first term better represents the relationship of intimacy that can be established between skin, fabric and fungi. The overall concept of the investigation resonates concepts and materials drawn from the world of biology, specifically mycology. Even though it is a scientific branch often considered marginal, it is reclaiming its influence in recent years thanks to the so-called “mushroom boom”, diffusely echoed in visual and cultural imaginaries. Curious coincidence is that the marginal condition interpreted by mycology within biology creates a prolific common ground with fashion studies, for their traditional secondary position occupied among human sciences. Thus, among the objectives of the project concept is using interdisciplinarity as a tool towards democratisation and awareness.
As previously mentioned, there is a lack in academic research regarding the specific topic, and the rare recent cases concentrate and limit to the fungal world as aesthetic fashion theme. While studies including both disciplines, fashion studies and mycology, are totally absent. Compared to mainstream actions, media channels or industry, facing a similar topic, their risk is often to merely wink to fungi for greenwashing strategies. On the contrary, my research aims to literally stick its hands in the matter, to work closely to the production chain, to largely deal with the development of an educational and awareness process, and for a campaign of public dissemination. The New European Bauhaus Prize 2023 represents the possibility to put under the spotlight some intimate yet current issues connected to the desire to look at nature to recover the ecosystem from anthropocentric damages. This challenge will be faced thanks to the collaboration with fungi, and the often under-estimated yet powerful discipline of fashion studies and design.
Two are the transferable key elements of the project concept. First, the interspecies fashion design workshop format (dealing with mycelium and muskin materials), that has been specifically conceived to be implemented and re-proposed on multiple levels and in different environments. Second, the curatorial project, which foresees the development of an interdisciplinary exhibition to display the whole process of investigation and outcomes. This is imagined as a public place for exhibiting scientific and historical evidence of the phenomenon, such as archival documentation from museums’ collections, and to illustrate the theoretical study on the relationship between human and fungi. Special attention will be given to fungal fashion items, accompanied by the display of the workshops results, and items from the market and the contemporary scene.
Through the award of the New European Bauhaus Prize 2023, it would be possible for me to expand the net of collaboration and to spread the spores of the project concept. To establish and reach higher goals in partnership with other researchers and Institutions that could support its implementation and dissemination.
The concept mainly considers the inclusive and sustainable potential of the addition fungi + fashion, which sometimes corresponds to its limits/challenges. Among others: the creation of a new aesthetics frame and communication imaginary; the renovation of materials supply chain; the reconfiguration of retail methodologies within the fashion system; the non-linear relation between humans and non-humans, where fashion pieces are considered as living items. More widely, the concept explores the mode for a sustainable transition to happen by reconfiguring a possible scenario. Where fashion designers are enabled to act like fungi, and where consumers acquire knowledge in order to feel at ease with these entities, willing to deal with them on a daily basis.
