Australian biotech firm Nanollose has generated plastic-free vegan leather for a beer dress in a bid to enhance research and development in alternative fabrics.
The dress was worn by Czech actress Aňa Geislerová (pictured) to this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival earlier this month.
Czech fashion designer Jakub Polanka led the overall design of the dress, which included a tulle-like fabric over the top. The beer was provided by Pilsner Urquell.
Speaking with Ragtrader, Nanollose executive chairman Dr Wayne Best said the creation of the vegan leather fabric and the completion of the dress took three months to complete.
“What we did is we took the pilsner beer and we fermented that with our bacteria,” Dr Best said. “So the bacteria ferment the beer, and they produce this material called microbial cellulose, which we then harvested and converted into a leather-like material.
“And they then took that leather-like material and use that as part of the base and some of the decorations in that dress.
“We made about 20 metres of material for them.”
Dr Best said it was the largest demand for the plastic-free vegan leather material Nanollose ever made in the lab.
“We learned an awful lot,” he said. “It's improved our understanding of the material and how to process it and so forth. I mean, obviously, beer is not the ultimate waste material we'd be using. That was obviously for PR purposes. But we learned a lot about the processing and how to make the right texture and so forth of the material.”
He added that there are a lot of vegan leathers in the market that contain plastic, indicating that they are not as sustainable.
“There are not many vegan leathers that don't contain some sort of plastic or backing material,” Dr Best said.
“We're trying to make a material that is actually more closely aligned to a nice, simple, biodegradable, vegan leather that doesn't contain plastic and doesn't contain a backing material to make it more versatile for people to use.”
Nanollose is preparing to design a suite of vegan leather prototypes to demonstrate the technology across different applications.
Its other priorities include completing a third pilot spin of its Nullarbor fibres with Birla Cellulose to test capacity for larger production volumes with a higher microbial cellulose content, as well as progress the manufacture of textiles and garments from the Nullarbor fibres produced in its second pilot spin.