Tag Archives: sustainable fashion

Winter jacket made with ‘brewed protein’ and enabled by synthetic biology

It’s called a ‘Moon Parka’,

[downloaded from https://sp.spiber.jp/en/tnfsp/mp/]

Adele Peters in her October 31, 2019 article for Fast Company describes the technology used to make this jacket,

A typical waterproof winter jacket is made with nylon—a material that, like other plastics, is made from petroleum. But a new limited-edition jacket from The North Face Japan uses something called “brewed protein” instead. It’s a material inspired by spider silk that is fermented in giant vats, the same way that breweries make beer.

It’s one of the first uses of a material produced by the Japanese startup Spiber, a company that has spent more than a decade developing a new process to make high-performance textiles and other products that don’t rely on fossil fuels, animals, or natural fibers like cotton, all of which have environmental issues. …

The company designs genes that code for a specific protein—the first was an exact replica of natural spider silk, known for its extreme strength—and then introduces the genes into microorganisms that can produce the protein efficiently. Inside giant tanks, the microorganisms are fed sugar, grow and multiply, and produce the protein through fermentation. …

Spiber first started collaborating with Goldwin, a Japanese outdoor brand that owns the Japanese rights to The North Face, in 2015, and created an early prototype of a jacket then. But it quickly realized that an exact replica of spider silk wouldn’t work well for the application; the material sucks up water, and the jacket needed to be waterproof.

“We spent the last four years going back to the drawing board, redesigning our protein molecule—the very order of the amino acids in the molecule,” says Meyer [Daniel Meyer, Spiber’s head of corporate global marketing]. “And we created our own hydrophobic [water repellent] version of spider silk. It’s inspired by natural spider silk, but we have made our own design changes such that it would be more hydrophobic and meet the performance requirements of The North Face Japan.”

The jacket is available for purchase but only by a lottery, which has now closed. According to Peters, a large, commercial production facility is being built in Thailand so that at some point a Moon Parka will be affordable. For reference, the lottery jackets were priced at ¥150,000 (about $1,377 US).

You can find Spiber here in mid-March [2020] according to the homepage.

Futuristic fashion with Biocouture and other future-focused clothing companies

Suzanne Lee and her ‘green tea’ couture are being featured in a May 20, 2014 article by Adele Peters about futuristic fashion and a new documentary, ‘The Next Black’, for Fast Company,

Fabric grown from bacteria. T-shirt designs that “refresh” themselves. Or how about a new way to dye fabrics without water or pollution? These are ideas for the future of fashion that blend style and sustainability.

Biocouture is growing new fabric from bacteria using a process more like brewing beer than making any other textiles. The company hopes that eventually clothing could be grown directly on dress forms, creating zero waste. …

Studio XO, a company pioneering interactive digital fashion, shares their vision for a “Tumblr for the body”–a subscription service for clothing that could automatically refresh itself as you wear it (picture a T-shirt with an ever-evolving print curated by designers or your friends). …

You can find the full 45 min. documentary embedded in the Peters article. You can also find additional information about Suzanne Lee’s work in my June 8, 2012 post titled, Material changes, which also features other designers.