Today people are looking for fabrics in piles of old clothes to make face masks, and this prompts many to think about the clothing industry for the first time. Is cheap and affordable clothing hurting our planet? Are we using people living in de facto slavery to save a few bucks on a T-shirt?
Well, designers, artists and companies are always ready to innovate, and here are ten of the strangest fabric materials you may or may not wear in the future.
10. Silk of the golden spider
Silk is the ultimate luxury fabric. Since ancient times, it has been sold across continents to those who wanted to feel its light and gliding touch on their skin. The Roman philosopher Seneca believed that there was little difference between wearing silk and walking without clothes - such good silk was brought from China to Rome. And yet, few people think about where they got their silk from. The silk wearer wears garments twisted by caterpillars. Insects rarely get the recognition they deserve from the fashion industry.
But caterpillars are not the only source of silk. The spider web is an amazing structure in itself, not only because of the complexity of its design, but also because of the silk from which it is made. Elastic and durable, it is ideal for catching prey, but these characteristics also make it an ideal fiber for making cloth - as long as you can get enough webs.
In Madagascar, people took the time to catch the Nephil orb webs and get their silk. It took the team eight years to make a cloak from their silk, measuring about 1m, it took the team eight years to catch the female spiders from the wild and slowly lure out their silk. It took 1.2 million spiders to create the cloak, so don't expect to wear this material anytime soon. It turns out to be a wonderful golden color.
9. Sea silk
If the idea of wearing spider silk scares you, but you still want to feel this pleasant and exclusive material on yourself, why not try byssus? Also known as sea silk, this fabric was once one of the most expensive in the world. Today, only one person maintains this tradition, diving in search of the rare shellfish that make it.
The noble pina is a large mollusk, the length of which can reach a meter. To keep their bulky shell attached to the seabed, molluscs spin strong fibers from protein. They are only about 6 cm long, but that's enough if you know how to turn them into clothes.
In the ancient world, sea silk, which could only be found in the Mediterranean, was sold all over the world, even to China. The rarity of shellfish and the difficulty of harvesting their fibers made sea silk extremely expensive. If once the rich bought trousers, coats or raincoats made of natural gold thread, today almost no clothes are made from this material.
8. Biocouture
If you don't want to wear animal derived fabrics, then Biocouture can be a fashion brand for you. Suzanne Lee's clothing assortment is dependent on organisms such as bacteria and fungi that grow their fabric. And if you are worried about the disposable nature of modern fashion, then you should know that these clothes can simply be thrown in the compost heap after you stop wearing them.
By placing bacterial cultures in a complex plant - a bath - and feeding them a complex diet - green tea - Biocouture obtains plant-based skin. Dried, colored and fashioned clothing is very similar to any other leather product.
This is not the ultimate goal for Biocouture. In the future, they aim to make clothes from microorganisms that are still alive. Wearing your clothes would be beneficial to them, as they will be powered by your bodily fluids.
7. Qmilch
Silk derives most of its value from the scarcity of the raw materials from which it is made. However, one entrepreneur came up with a silk substitute made from a material you can find in your refrigerator. Qmilch uses proteins found in cow's milk to create a fine filament that behaves almost exactly like its more expensive competitor.
Milk cloth was invented a long time ago, and milk cotton was popular for a while in the 1930s, but it was typically blended with acrylonitrile to strengthen the milk casein fibers.
However, other artificial fabrics were invented that seemed less dairy to consumers. Qmilch gets rid of these synthetic additives and claims to be more environmentally friendly. Approximately 6 liters of milk is apparently enough to make a whole dress from Qmilch.
6. Solar fabric
Have you ever run out of battery power because you left it at home? This could become a problem of the past if fashion designers start using solar generators in their work.
There are already some garments that use solar panels to charge phones and other electronics. These are mainly rigid panels that can be closed or opened by the user to collect solar energy. Unfortunately, solar panels are still not the most attractive objects, they are bulky and must be pointed towards the sun for optimal efficiency.
However, in the future it will be possible to weave clothes from fibers that themselves are capable of capturing energy from sunlight. These clothes will reflect light from any angle and will be able to recharge throughout the day. However, before such clothing becomes mainstream, it will take several major breakthroughs in solar cell design. Perhaps the most plausible way to incorporate solar panels into clothing is to make them small and produce a fabric composed of miniature panels.
5. Old newspapers
However, not everything in fashion has to be high-tech. Sometimes the best thing you can do for the environment is to simply recycle old clothes or other things. How about newspapers?
In the dark days of the Great Depression, people used to stuff their clothes with newspaper to keep them warm in winter. You can now pay Italian artist Ivano Vitali to turn old papers into haute couture. Since the 1990s, Vitali has created clothing and artwork almost exclusively from discarded newspapers.
To create his own threads, the artist cuts the paper into strips and sorts them by color, and then glues them. This use of their natural color avoids the need for additional dyes. By simply twisting the paper, you can create a fairly short thread out of it that can be knitted into any shape you want.
4. Mucus mixin
Mixins are unsightly looking creatures with a somewhat unfortunate body problem. When some people are stressed, they sweat a lot, but when myxina is stressed, it produces thick mucus. This slime is so thick and effective that it blocks the gills of attackers that even predators as voracious as sharks retreat from the liters of sticky liquid that myxin alone can produce. When a truck carrying these worms crashed in Oregon, the road was buried under a layer of mucus.
However, scientists are amazed at how mixins can create so much mucus from so little. Someone, seeing this slime, thought "fashion".
By pulling the slime and spinning it, you can make a thin thread that looks like silk.Currently, only a small amount of this silk has been produced, but someday it will be possible to introduce the genes responsible for mucus into bacteria, making it easy to harvest. Although Mixin may need to change the name before Mixin's clothing is released globally.
3.Old cassettes
Show your young man a music cassette, and he may not believe that these awkward pieces of plastic were once the only way to listen to your favorite band. At one time, billions of tapes were made, and most of them ended up in landfills. With Sonic Fabrics, however, your old tapes can get a new sound.
Sonic Fabrics is the brainchild of artist and designer Alice Santoro, who takes tape from old cassettes and mixes it with polyester fibers before making clothes out of them. The resulting material resembles denim, but has not yet completely lost its musical roots.
By taking a cassette player that has been modified and running it over fabric, the music stored on the old tape comes to life, and you can hear what was recorded on it and sort. As the tapes are intertwined, this effect is described as "scratching five records backwards at the same time."
2. Pineapples
Pineapples are delicious, but they are also a source of clothing. In the Philippines, where pineapple is grown on large plantations, clothing made from pineapple was once popular with the local elite. While the pineapple fruit was destined for tables around the world, the long, fibrous leaves were harvested and cut to produce long, white fibers. After a laborious process, these fibers were sorted into fibers suitable for making strong and coarse fabrics and finer grades used for making Pina fabrics. It can be woven into luxurious clothing. Pina is currently experiencing a renaissance as it is environmentally friendly and made from an agricultural by-product.
Another way of using pineapple leaves has also been developed, which turns them into an alternative to animal skin. Pinatex is made by taking pineapple fibers and mixing them with an acid derived from corn. This creates a mesh of fibers that is processed until it looks and acts very much like traditional leather. Designers from all over the world proudly say that their models are dressed in the finest pineapples.
1. Woolen mammoth fur
Sustainability is the watchword for many businesses these days, but some people just crave exclusivity in their fashion that can't be bought in every store. For those with a picky taste, a thick wallet and a cold mind, what could be more beautiful than a woolly mammoth fur hat?
The Siberian tundra contains thousands of woolly mammoth skeletons that are dug out of the permafrost every year. These bones are sold to museums and collectors, but sometimes not only hard bones are removed. Sometimes the cold kept everything from the internal organs to the hairy hair that gave the mammoths their names. Even though they became extinct thousands of years ago, you can still buy clothes made from real mammoths. Vladimir Ammosov's uncle gave a bag made of mammoth wool and he instructed a weaver to turn it into a hat. While it has a unique provenance, this hat is most likely not one of the most comfortable you will ever wear - it has been described as very spiky and looks like a "massage comb."
