At Geri Sims, we like to use a lot of cloth in our designs. We try to keep our drapery in good condition so we can reuse it. But every year we go through tons of fabric to keep up with the changes in fashion. This fabric isn’t necessarily sustainable, especially for fabrics that are made of man-made materials.
One graduate student and her professor got an idea from a science fiction novel about cloth that can compost rapidly. The idea was to turn mushrooms into cloth. It was a wild idea, but a professor decided to take her on as a research assistant to see if it could be done.
Why mushrooms? They break down very quickly in nature. Picture all of our fabric being compostable. That would save a lot of space in our landfills and also give fashion designers a new material to work with. The root structure of a mushroom, known as mycelium, has been used to build things in the past. However, those have been hard things like styrofoam, not a soft structure like cloth.
They did find a process after much trial and error, but the whole concept is still in its earliest stages.
While we can’t offer mushroom cloth at your wedding yet, we can offer a wide range of draperies to make your wedding space more magical than you can imagine. Contact Geri Sims to learn how your wedding dreams can come true.
