DD2000. Suzanne Lee Talk

Suzanne Lee is a fashion designer turned biological conjurer. Suzanne Lee Directs the BioCulture project, which came from and idea in her book Fashioning the Future: Tomorrow’s Wardrobe in which she discusses fashion and future technologies: Can we grow a dress from a vat of liquid?

Her talk was very interesting as she discusses something I personally have never seen or even heard of before. She talks about making her own ‘vegetable leather’, she tells us how this is done and how it can be used. She uses bacteria, yeasts and organisms in a fermentation process to spin threads to create a matt on the surface. She uses boiled tea and sugar which when cooled living organisms are added; she keeps the liquid at a certain temperature in a bath (or if nice out, outside).  When left for up to 2-3 weeks it is ready to wash and spread out for the water to evaporate which will then leave the end product. This can then be sewn and coloured by using iron oxidation, vegetable staining or indigo.  You can tell that Suzanne is truly passionate and interested in this new method and way of producing fabric and is still finding new things to do and flaws, which need to resolve. She talks about her appeal to the fabric and how it almost resembles human skin, which is something she likes and is interested in. When the fabric is done and hasn’t been coloured the tea leaves it this kind of nude but transparent colour. She then goes into the problems she has found, such as it isn’t water resistant as it is made of water. If you were to go outside in the rain the fabric would fall apart and the stitching would come apart. She is really interested in keeping the fabric as environmentally friendly and recycled as possible, the liquid left over to make the fabric can be re-used again, the ways in which she forms colour on the fabric is using vegetable stain; also the indigo she would use to die it would only have to be dipped once for a very short time, but she said that cotton would have to be dipped several times.

Her talk drew me in straight away from the word go, she is very dedicated and determined to carry on and be successful at what she is doing. Overall a brilliant talk.


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