Shared harvest: a vegan bio-textile fashion future

11am – 12pm
1pm – 2pm
3pm – 4pm

Level 3 in Z9 Building(Room 350)

Suitable for ages 12+

Free on the day(limited spaces)
or $5 reservation fee in advance(plus GST & booking fee)

Shared harvest: a vegan bio-textile fashion future - Here are some we made earlier — Here are some we made earlier

Workshops exploring vegan bio-textile fashion wearables

Enjoy making and taking home your personally-designed vegan bio-textual clothing. Share your kombucha live culture with friends and family to spread the love of vegan bio-textiles. Bio–textiles are a sustainable, biodegradable, infinitely reusable, and democratic material.The workshops propose a speculative future in which bio-textiles (from kombucha) act as a catalyst for global community collectives to share, connect and educate through live bacteria, empowering ‘homegrown’ vegan apparel.

NB There is a colourful display of the raw kombucha on level 2 by the central staircase in the main building.

Bookings are essential and tickets will be released soon.

The duration is 1 hour

The Creators

Presented by

Dean Brough (Head of Studies School of Design)
Alice Payne (Fashion lecturer)
Dr Peter Musk (The Edge Science Catalyst)

Partners

QUT has been partnering with The Edge, State Library of Queensland, since 2014 to research how the bio-textile can be modified for different purposes and worked into clothing and fashion artefacts, as well as how it could be scaled up for industrial manufacturing.

The Making Of

How did you make it?

Making kombucha fabric is almost like brewing beer. We produce it by fermenting tea using a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast, or SCOBY. This forms a fast-growing curd on the surface which we harvest, wash and dry to make a material of a strength and texture somewhere between leather and paper.
Our work contributes to this area through testing both the optimum growing conditions for the textile and its application to construct durable fashion artefacts.

What's the point of difference?

It’s one of only a few kombucha bio-textile research programs in the world and the only one in Australia. This research is fascinating and fun – we are investigating the properties of what is essentially a brand new textile.

How is this relevant to our future lives?

The workshops propose a speculative future in which bio-textiles act as a catalyst for global community collectives to share, connect and educate through live bacteria, empowering ‘homegrown’ vegan apparel.

What's some other interesting facts?

Students have already produced briefcases, handbags, shirts, shoes, vests, jewellery and even whole outfits. We’ve come a long way in the experimental process – exploring which dyes work best with the material, determining the best ways to shape and join it, finding how to waterproofing it, and adding reinforcing materials like cotton gauze to the growing curd to make the product stronger.
There is a growing field in which fashion design intersects with biotechnology.
Bio-artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr have created ‘victimless leather’ grown from cultured cells. Suzanne Lee in the UK and Sacha Laurin in the US are each working with Kombucha material. Although still speculative, these collaborations between science and design point to new material applications for fashion.

Getting to CreateX

Cnr Kelvin Grove Rd and Musk Avenue,
QUT Kelvin Grove Campus

More information