Dress made of living mycelium can renew and repair itself

Dress made of living mycelium can renew and repair itself(dezeen.com)

59 points by speckx 3 hours ago | 38 comments

dustfinger 2 hours ago |

I wonder if there is a health hazard wearing this due to breathing in spores or toxins released into the air? Or perhaps there is a risk that the wearer will absorb harmful chemicals secreted by the mycelium via contact with the wearer's skin? Very interesting none the less. I have imagined humans making living clothes for a long time, so it is nice to see that idea materialize.

ChrisMarshallNY 11 minutes ago | |

Some people are very allergic to mushrooms. I wonder if that would extend to this.

But it's pretty cool.

dylan604 54 minutes ago | |

"Following drying at 45 degrees, the material is not quite living and not quite dead, but instead in a "low-metabolic, dormant-like state", Li told Dezeen, meaning it is not actively growing."

Don't think spores will be an issue since it's not the mycelium's sex organ mushroom that you're thinking of

svachalek 2 hours ago | |

It seems telling that none of the photos show anyone wearing it.

Qem 52 minutes ago | |

> Or perhaps there is a risk that the wearer will absorb harmful chemicals secreted by the mycelium via contact with the wearer's skin?

Or just getting a bad itch.

AlanYx 2 hours ago |

The claim in the article that saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewer's yeast) naturally produced the deep blue color in the butterfly example is not actually true, although it's a gorgeous effect.

These are genetically engineered variants of brewer's yeast designed to produce pigments.

Forgeties79 1 hour ago | |

Wow you weren’t kidding that’s a beautiful color

inigyou 1 hour ago | | |

You can buy this color for 3€/meter at any weekend fabric market.

hercynium 3 minutes ago |

Cordyceps, huh? An interesting choice! And ironically the subject of an article on Ars Technica that just dropped...

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/parasitic-zombie-fun...

funkygibbon 1 hour ago |

I would buy one, but I don’t think I have mushroom in my wardrobe for it.

samudrijan 16 minutes ago | |

Soylent queen

sajithdilshan 1 hour ago |

This would turn into a mould infested nightmare

juancn 2 hours ago |

How does it smell though?

dhosek 57 minutes ago | |

I didn’t think of the smell at all, I was wondering what the feel was like. There’s a certain level of comfort that’s expected from clothing that matters. There’s also the question of breathability. Is it going to trap sweat and smells like polyester clothing?

dylan604 53 minutes ago | |

probably smells like patchouli

ComputerPerson 2 hours ago | |

Most people associate mushrooms and fungi with the smell of their substrate; they commonly don't have a strong smell themselves

I doubt it has a smell stronger than the wearer

edit: this is a bad take, upon further research

AlanYx 54 minutes ago | | |

The mushroom smell isn't from either the substrate or respiration. That distinct odor is 1-octen-3-ol. Biochemists call it "mushroom alcohol." It's caused by enzymatic breakdown of their cell walls, and it thought to be related to signalling.

I doubt it would be strongly present here. The article says the mycelium are close to dormant.

You can actually purchase mushroom alcohol commercially as a food additive.

_whiteCaps_ 2 hours ago | | |

Chanterelles smell great. I would wear something that smelled like that.

Pine mushrooms, not so much.

fluoridation 1 hour ago | | |

I've done cultures on agar agar and mycelium definitely does have a distinctive smell. To me it's reminiscent to the damp smell of a concrete basement, though less stale and unpleasant.

andai 1 hour ago |

Could they make a house out of this?

bastawhiz 1 hour ago | |

It doesn't seem to have the rigidity to be structurally sound for construction.

dylan604 50 minutes ago | | |

my tent material doesn't have rigidity to it either. if we change out the word "house", it could be an interesting material to play with for other types of shelter. it's supposed to be hydrophobic, but how hydrophobic? a light spritz or spilled drink or holds up in the rain?

LoganDark 1 hour ago |

Is there a possibility of the organisms escaping the material and infesting the environment? That's what I would worry about with mycelium.

josefritzishere 2 hours ago |

Is there an adjective for something that's nifty but also gross?

sdellis 1 hour ago | |

Blursed!

kibwen 1 hour ago | |

I'm not sure it's any more objectively gross than normal textile materials. Imagine you lived in a hairless, furless world where nothing like wool was a thing, and then suddenly we discovered a weird fluffy mammal that extruded long fibers out of its flesh; the people of that world might call that gross, we'd just call it ordinary.

applfanboysbgon 8 minutes ago | | |

Okay, but that is gross! We're just desensitized to it, and we had a practical survival reason to initially overcome any aversion to cloaking ourselves in animal hair, until it became ingrained in human culture from birth. This isn't really making a compelling case to overcome a new aversion to something gross...

chrisjj 2 hours ago |

> nutrient solution is applied over a hole, along with a small patch of fresh fungus

So, not repair itself.

bastawhiz 55 minutes ago | |

Exactly. You can place a patch with some glue over a hole in fabric to achieve the same thing in a traditional garment. Iron-on repair patches are also similar.

It's one thing to say "get it wet and leave it in the sun". It's another thing to require identical replacement material and nutrient slurry (I don't know about you, but I think I can source fabric glue more easily than potato water).

dustfinger 2 hours ago | |

To be fair it only claimed "near self-repairing".

cestith 2 hours ago | | |

One could think of it as mostly self-repairing with some outside encouragement.

soiltype 2 hours ago | | |

The headline is more ambitious, that's probably what they meant

chrisjj 1 hour ago | | |

Nope. "Dress made of living mycelium can renew and repair itself".

andai 1 hour ago | |

Does the fresh fungus need to be genetically identical? I read something about mycelial nuclei in high school and it was weird.

fluoridation 1 hour ago | | |

I guess they're just trying to get the networks to interlace, not to reconstitute into a single organism and be capable of nutrient exchange, so I don't think it matters if they're identical or not.

meindnoch 47 minutes ago |

Pretty disgusting tbh.