Blind and sighted people can learn about cutting edge textiles at the Healthy Materials Lab. Taking a tactile tour introduced me to textures I’d read about but never felt, and others that completely surprised me. Located on the Parsons School of Design campus, part of The New School in New York City, the lab gives design students the opportunity to touch, smell, and experiment with innovative, healthier materials. Enjoy this descriptive video tour with Assistant Professor of Fashion Design and Social Justice Sugandha Gupta and graduate research assistant Ahmad Abbasi.
Descriptive Transcript
Sugandha: So I would like to start with this kombucha leather. I’m holding it in my hands. It is a brownish color and it’s very translucent. So it’s like a blend of maybe a rust and a brown color. It’s translucent and it’s made out of kombucha tea with the fermentation process. It has a very strong, pungent smell, and you can almost smell the tea. And it’s very tempting. You almost want to eat it.
My name is Sugandha Gupta, and I’m the Assistant Professor of Fashion Design and Social Justice at Parsons School of Design. I’m a white-appearing Indian woman with platinum blond hair and fair skin and violet eyes. And I’m wearing a black dress and a golden necklace. And today we are talking about three different sustainable, renewable leathers that are made out of natural materials like plants and kombucha tea.
Ahmad: Hello, I am Ahmad Abbasi. I am a researcher at Parsons Healthy Material Lab, and this is where we are right now. I am a white-appearing male with a bald head and a gray shirt. Yeah, we will be talking about three kinds of leather that we have at our Healthy Material Lab. And we will talk about why they are healthy and what they could be used for.
Sugandha: It is edible because it’s made out of an edible material, which is kombucha tea. It is very soft and malleable. And an interesting thing about this material is that it can melt with heat, because it is made with fermentation and it doesn’t have any coating on it, it’s natural. Do you want to talk about the circularity of this material?
Ahmad: Yeah. As you mentioned that it, it melts with temperature so that doesn’t make it durable, but that means it’s compostable or it’s biodegradable. So that, that adds to the sustainability or circularity of the product. And because it’s made of bio materials. So, yeah, that’s how we consider it healthy.
Sugandha: And it doesn’t require any kind of emissions of gases, so it doesn’t have any big carbon footprint. You would usually just make a big vat of the tea with fructose and then let it mold and then dry that to make this leather. In fact, in some of the areas of this leather you can even feel the bumps or the bubbles trapped inside it. So it’s a really fascinating material to work with. And what’s really interesting about it is that researchers have also used interesting medicines to inject in these kinds of leathers to also emulate the medicinal aspects of materials that we can wear on, on our bodies. So next we would like to talk about rhubarb leather. It is made out of rhubarb, which is…you want to elaborate on that?
Ahmad: It’s made out of protein. So protein fibers and yeah, it’s like, you can say like synthetic leather, but it’s made of healthy materials. We…we include labels in our libraries so researchers and students can come and read descriptions about the materials and what it’s used for.
Sugandha: And also this material looks just like…and just like a leather hide. So it has a tan color and it has a soft surface at the back, kind of like suede, but it’s maybe a little more rough than suede to touch and very smooth on the surface. And unlike natural animal leather, it is not as flowy or drapey. It does not have any stretch. So this is the second leather. And just so you know, rhubarb is a material that’s also used for making natural dyes. So it’s fascinating that you can also get this kind of leather out of it that can be applied in different materials, like bags or even belts, etc. And last but not the least, we would like to talk about mushroom leather.
Ahmad: Yeah, yeah. Mushroom or mycelium leather. It’s…it feels like foam a little bit. It’s usually not used in fashion, but used in construction tiling and insulation. It has a brown color. And yeah, as I said, has a foamy texture. Interesting thing about mycelium: it could be used in a wide range of products, not just leather, but in different applications as packaging or as furniture. And they take different shapes and forms.
Sugandha: And it also is interesting because it has a lot of marks, natural marks and bumps and dents on it. It’s very…cozy. Feeling like it has, it’s soft but you can also like kind of pinch it a little bit or press it a little bit, and it almost leaves kind of an indent. And it also just resembles a little bit of wood grain texture on the surface because it’s not even colored. There’s unevenness of the hues throughout it. It’s quite strong. It’s not stretchable, it’s very stiff material, but it’s very, very soft. And it has a lot of structure in it. So that’s really interesting about it. It’s very structured. So that’s our little insight about these natural leathers. And you can come to Healthy Materials Lab to check these materials out to see what they feel like, and experience them and touch them.
Ahmad: I’d like to add that mycelium is rapidly growing and easy to grow. So that also adds to the sustainability. So you can grow the mycelium, create the product, and at the end of life, just recycle the mycelium. Maybe use it for growing new mushrooms or mycelium for other products. And yeah, we can visit the Healthy Material Library. It has a wide range of materials and products, and textiles and construction and plastic–bioplastics. Which can help designers get an idea of what are available options to use in their designs.