Photo: Lars Dittrich
Every time another brand loudly announces a new collection made of “vegan leather,” I don't pay attention to it. Because if you dig a little deeper than the press releases, it usually turns out that this eco-innovation is old polyurethane, to which a handful of apple or cactus cake has been added for the sake of a beautiful story.
We're all adults and we understand perfectly well how modern greenwashing works. That's why I initially dismissed the news that shoes made from mycelium would be shown at Milan Design Week with another dose of skepticism.
But then I read the details, and my inner cynic let loose a little.
Photo: Lars Dittrich
The thing is, the Free University of Brussels (VUB) and the Royal Opera House La Monnaie have done something truly extraordinary. They didn't just put a piece of cultivated mushroom on a regular rubber sole to report on sustainability. They created a shoe that is made entirely of pure mycelium. That is, the mushroom root system here works not as a decorative wrapper, but as a supporting structure.
Imagine this collaboration: on one side, microbiologists and design researcher Lars Dietrich, fiddling with their petri dishes, and on the other, Marie De Rijk, the opera house's head shoemaker, accustomed to working with leather, blocks, and traditional craftsmanship. Two completely different worlds collided to force a living microorganism to take the form of a functional shoe. It took two years. Two years of trying to force a material that grows in flat sheets in nature into an object capable of supporting the weight of a person.
To keep the shoe from falling apart, Dietrich used two different strains of fungi. One was forced to grow as a dense foam, forming a sole that holds the load without any additional reinforcement or glue. The other strain was grown as a flexible sheet, resembling leather, and was allowed to grow on the upper.
Photo: Lars Dittrich
I like that they don't try to pass this prototype off as something familiar and glossy. The shoe looks emphatically brutal: open seams, visible multi-layering, uneven edges. It is honest in its imperfection. The designers seem to say: yes, this grew in a laboratory, it lives by its own rules, and we will not disguise it as perfect factory shoes.
Lars Dietrich himself admits that this is more of a conceptual statement — a fixation on what science is generally capable of doing with biomaterials today.
And for the masters of the Opera La Monnaie, it was a challenge. Marie De Rijk admitted that the first samples of mycelium were far from what you could normally work with. But they stubbornly adapted their centuries-old techniques of laminating leather to this new, incomprehensible material, because the theater has a “Green Opera” strategy and is really looking for ways to create costumes without harming the planet.
The entire project is being shown at Dropcity, an architecture and design center hidden in the old tunnels of Milan Central Station. They didn't just put a shoe on a lit podium, they recreated the atmosphere of a working bio-laboratory. It's like you're standing there watching biology and fashion intersect, from the first cultures in a test tube to the finished product.
Photo: Lars Dittrich
Lars Dietrich is currently working on a very fine line – he is creating a completely new category of materials, trying not to slip into cheap slogans about “alternative plastics”. And although we are unlikely to go to the nearest shopping mall to buy such mushroom shoes tomorrow, the very fact that it is technically possible gives hope. At least that one day “ecological shoes” will no longer mean shoes made from petroleum products.
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⚡ Readers' Pulse
Would you risk wearing such a brutal “mushroom” or is this too strange an experiment for you?
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