Material innovation has become fashion’s headline answer to the climate crisis. Mycelium leather, algae-based fibers, and regenerative cotton are presented as revolutionary solutions, each carrying the promise that new textiles can reconcile consumer desire with ecological responsibility. The narrative is seductive because it suggests that sustainability can be achieved without structural change, that the system can continue at its current pace if only its fibers are transformed. These narratives are powerful precisely because they allow the industry to project a future of continuity: if fibers can be reinvented, then production and consumption may continue at their current pace, only with a cleaner conscience. Sustainability is reframed as a matter of substitution, not transformation.

Yet the core of fashion’s ecological burden lies less in what fibers are used than in how the industry is organized. More than 100 billion garments are produced annually. a figure that has doubled in two decades. This acceleration drives monocultures of cotton, the dominance of polyester, and mountains of textile waste that outstrip the capacity of ecosystems to absorb them. New materials, however innovative, do not interrupt this metabolic logic. Instead, they often intensify it by supplying fresh novelty, offering both industry and consumer the reassurance of “progress” while leaving speed and volume intact. Innovation, under such conditions, risks becoming another iteration of extractive logic - a green displacement rather than a resolution.

To grasp the depth of fashion’s ecological crisis, one must move beyond the surface language of material substitution. The challenge is structural and cultural at once. Fashion’s industrial metabolism- its acceleration, its dependence on perpetual novelty, its coupling of identity and disposability -pushes ecological systems beyond planetary boundaries. Unless value itself is redefined, away from the pursuit of growth and toward a framework of ecological dignity, innovation will remain insufficient. Such a framework must extend to all dimensions of the system: to the Human Resources whose labor sustains production yet remains precarious and underpaid; to animals exploited for materials; and to the ecosystems whose regenerative cycles are consistently breached. Without such a shift, fashion will not only miss its climate commitments but will also reproduce the very structures of exploitation, erasure, and ecological overshoot on which it has long depended.

Reishi TM, a premium alternative to leather (© Edie Lou)

The Promise of Innovation

The contemporary sustainability narrative in fashion increasingly begins not in ateliers or design studios but in biotechnology labs and pilot facilities. At the forefront is Bolt Threads, founded 2009, headquartered in Emeryville, California, where researchers developed Microsilk TM, a bioengineered fiber inspired by spider silk, produced through yeast fermentation, and Mylo TM, a mycelium-based leather alternative. Most mycelium-based materials are cultivated in controlled vertical farming or bioreactor systems, where fungal mycelium grows on agricultural waste or nutrient substrates.

The growth environment is tightly managed - temperature, humidity, oxygen - to produce sheets of dense, interwoven fibers. These are processed, pressed, and treated (sometimes with additional coatings or binders) to achieve the texture and durability of leather. Microsilk is another bioengineered fiber, produced by fermenting yeast, water, and sugar. The yeast is genetically programmed with spider DNA sequences, enabling it to create proteins that mimic natural spider silk. These proteins are harvested, purified, and spun into fibers. Stronger than steel by weight, lightweight, and fully biodegradable. Bolt Threads marketed it as combining “nature’s genius with industrial scalability”. Bolt Threads were pioneers in the field of biofabricated materials, helping make mycelium and silk-inspired biomaterials legible to fashion -setting precedent even as their commercial model faced severe scaling constraints. Mylo TM production is currently paused, yet not permanently discontinued. B-silk TM is no longer being pushed as a fashion textile, but instead used in skincare, haircare, and cosmetics. Bolt Threads continues to operate, with a strategic picot toward the beauty and personal care sector.

Another mycelium company from Emeryville, California, MycoWorks was founded in 2013 and has quickly become a leader in bio fabricated materials. Its patented Fine Mycelium TM process engineers mycelium cells into dense, interwoven sheets that can be tuned for durability, texture, and strength. From this innovation, the company developed Reishi TM, a premium alternative to leather designed specifically for luxury applications. Unlike many mycelium-based leathers that face limitations in scale and consistency, Fine Mycelium TM allows for precision control that meets the performance standards of high-end markets. In 2023, MycoWorks opened its first commercial-scale production plant in Union, South Carolina, making it the first company to bring mycelium leather into industrial production.

In parallel, Spiber, founded in Japan in 2007, has emerged as a leading force in bio fabricated textiles. Its Brewed Protein TM - a recombination, protein-based fiber initially inspired by spider silk but now distinct in composition - has entered both couture and performance markets, appearing in Iris van Herpen’s sculptural gowns as well as outerwear developed for The North Face and Goldwin. Both Reishi TM from California and Brewed Protein TM from Japan are biofabricated, but defined by divergent technological pathways. Spiber’s Brewed Protein TM exemplifies a synthetic biology approach, using genetically engineered microbes to produce recombinant proteins through fermentation, which are then spun into fibers resembling silk or cashmere. It is essentially a bottom-up molecular approach - programming organisms to manufacture proteins in tanks. By contrast, MycoWorks’ Reishi TM is based on mycelium tissue engineering: sheets of fungal cells are cultivated under tightly controlled conditions to grow directly into substrates with leather-like properties. This is more of a top-down structural approach - guiding a living organism to grow into a usable material.

Microsilk is another bioengineered fibre (© Edie Lou)

Alongside mycelium and recombinant proteins, algae-based textiles have also emerged as a frontier of material experimentation. Start-ups such as AlgiKnit (now rebranded as Keel Labs) have developed kelp-derived yarns designed to replace petroleum-based synthetics. Keel Labs, founded in North Carolina in 2017, has developed Kelsun TM, a fiber spun from kelp-derived alginate. The process involves extracting polymers from fast-growing seaweed and extruding them into filaments that can be spun and woven using conventional textile machinery. Kelp requires no fertiliser, freshwater, or arable land and grows rapidly while sequestering carbon, positioning it as one of the most regenerative raw materials available. These fibers are spun into threads that can be dyed and woven like cotton or polyester, but with significantly lower land and freshwater requirements. While still limited in commercial scale, algae’s rapid growth rates and capacity for carbon sequestration position it as a potentially regenerative feedstock for fashion.

Taken together, mycelium leathers, protein-based fibers, and algae-derived yarns demonstrate how biotechnology can begin to reimagine the material foundations of fashion. Yet most of these fibers remain confined to the prototyping stage, showcased in capsules and collaborations but far from industrial scale. And even if they were to scale, the structural logic of overproduction and acceleration would remain intact.

The Mirage of Material Salvation

As we can see, there is no shortage of material innovation. Material innovation is widely celebrated as fashion’s sustainability frontier. New textiles are marketed as breakthroughs capable of reconciling fashion with planetary limits. Luxury groups like LVMH and Kering highlight partnerships with biotech firms in annual ESG reports - which actually could be a good start -, positioning fiber innovation as evidence of ecological progress. Yet this narrative risks overstating the power of substitution. Fashion’s crisis is not primarily a question of which fibers are used, but of how much is produced and consumed. Obviously.

The global fashion industry produces over 100 billion garments each year, more than double the volume of two decades ago. This expansion has created an environmental burden rivalled only by the food and energy sectors: vast water use, pesticide-intensive cotton cultivation, microplastic pollution from synthetics, and an estimated 8-10% of global carbon emissions. Within the framework of planetary boundaries (Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2015, Richardson et al., 2023), fashion contributes directly to transgressions in climate stability, freshwater use, biochemical flows, and biodiversity loss. Fiber production has already surpassed 110 million tonnes per year and is projected to reach 146 million tonnes by 2030 if current trends persist. The sector is responsible for a massive share of greenhouse gas emissions, alongside enormous land, water, and chemical footprints. Cotton cultivation, for example, consumes roughly 3000-6000 litres of water for a single T-shirt, while polyester - now 54% of global fiber use - sheds half a million tonnes of microplastics annually into oceans. Against this scale, swapping one fiber for another cannot by itself resolve ecological overshoot.

Even where novel fibers reach industrial scale, from mycelium-based leather to biofabricated silk and algae-derived fibers, they bring their own challenges. Biofabricated proteins require fermentation tanks, controlled environments, and chemical processing, often powered by fossil-based energy. Algae-based yarns must be chemically stabilized as spun, processes that could offset gains from reduced land or water use. Life cycle analyses suggest that such materials may lower certain impacts, but only marginally - and only if the increase in overall production volumes is contained. If production continues to rise, new fibers risk becoming additive, feeding a system that already overshoots several planetary boundaries. Right now, lab-grown fibers are produced with far lower land use and, in theory, lower water use. They don’t require pesticides, and grow rapidly. But once production moves from small lab batches to millions of square meters of material, scaling them up to compete with cotton (25% of global fiber use) or polyester (54%) new challenges will arise.

Energy demand will skyrocket, running fermentation tanks, vertical farms, or bioreactors at industrial levels requires enormous amounts of electricity, often still fossil-fuel based. Feedstock sourcing will become industrialized, yeast, sugar, kelp, or agricultural by-porducts need to be produced at a huge scale, which can create new land, water, or fertiliser pressures. Economies will react to scale pressure. To bring costs down, companies may cut corners shift to less regenerative practices - echoing the widespread cultivation of Bt cotton or false declaration of “organic” production under mass-market pressures. The contradiction is that at pilot scale, these fibers look promising, but at industrial scale, they risk replicating the same extractive logics of mainstream textiles.

This is the danger of what might be called the “mirage of material salvation”. Innovation, while valuable, is framed as a technological fix that allows business-as-usual growth. Runway showcases of mycelium handbags or algae dresses currently serve more as demonstrations of intent than as drivers of systemic change. They function as symbolic demonstrations, signalling ecological progress while leaving fashion’s underlying metabolism of acceleration, overproduction, and disposability intact. Without parallel measures - slowing production volumes, redefining value beyond novelty, and embedding binding regulation - new fibers risk legitimizing, rather than transforming, the structures of exploitation and ecological overshoot. The future of fashion will depend not on materials alone, as we can see, but on systemic change calibrated to the thresholds defined by planetary boundaries.

Unsold textiles pile up in landfills, rivers, and coastline (© Edie Lou)

Overproduction as Fashion’s Central Crisis

At the heart of fashion’s ecological footprint lies not only the choice of fibers but the sheer quantity of garments being produced. In little more than two decades, fashion’s output has expanded at an unprecedented pace, with production volumes multiplying far beyond population growth or genuine need. This expansion far outpaces population growth, meaning that global wardrobes are saturated with excess. Garments are worn fewer times and discarded faster, fuelling mountains of textile waste in countries such as Ghana, Chile, and Kenya, where millions of tonnes of used clothing are exported annually under the guise of “recycling”.

Markets like Kantamanto in Ghana or Gikomba in Kenya receive massive volumes of secondhand garments, through Europe’s “take-back” system, much of which is unusable due to poor quality. The result is ecological and social stress: local economies are disrupted, while unsold textiles pile up in landfills, rivers, and coastline. Only about 1% of clothing collected worldwide is turned back into new fibers as a closed-loop recycling system. The crisis is, thus, one of volume: a system built to overproduce, oversell, and over-discard.

This acceleration is structural. Fashion’s business model depends on planned obsolescence, the rapid turnover of trends, and the artificial compression of seasons. Fast fashion brands like Shein upload thousands of new styles daily, but even luxury houses produce up to six or more collections per year, with pre-collections and collaborations amplifying the cycle. Overproduction is not a side effect of the system; it is the system. Efficiency gains in fiber or dye innovation are overwhelmed by this metabolic drive to generate ever more product, ensuring that ecological savings are quickly nullified.

The consequences extend beyond carbon emissions and water use. Overproduction drives over extraction or resources - from cotton monocultures depleting soils to polyester production tied to fossil fuels and microplastic pollution. It also perpetuates labor exploitation, since maintaining low prices for massive volumes requires squeezing costs at every step of the supply chain. The downward pressure falls on garment workers, especially in the Global South, whose wages remain among the lowest in manufacturing sectors worldwide. In other words, excess in the North is directly enabled by precarity in the South.

Overproduction, then, is the hinge between ecology and labor. It explains why innovation alone cannot deliver sustainability: new fibers introduced into an expanding system simply add to the total load, rather than replacing existing ones. Without policies that address the logic of overproduction - through regulation, binding limits, and systemic slowdown - fashion will continue to exceed planetary boundaries and erode human dignity, regardless of whether its garments are made from cotton, polyester, or mycelium.

A garment can move from factory to influencer feed to landfill within a single quarter (© Edie Lou)

Cultural Drivers of Excess

Overproduction in fashion is inseparable from the cultural and psychological systems that sustain demand. For decades, consumers have been conditioned to equate novelty with necessity: the launch of a new collection, campaign, or micro-trend signals not merely availability but obligation. This conditioning is embedded in marketing, retail design, and media cycles which foster the perception that last season’s garment is already obsolete. The result is a culture where the desire for the new eclipses the value of durability, feeding the very acceleration that drives ecological overshoot.

Fashion’s ecological crisis cannot be separated from its cultural machinery. The industry manufactures desire as effectively as it manufactures garments, investing staggering resources in consumer conditioning. In 2024, global fashion advertising expenditure surpassed $750 billion, while the influencer marketing economy grew beyond $25 billion, with fashion as one of its leading sectors. These figures are not peripheral - they show that the sustaining demand today is engineered. Digital platforms are central to this mechanism. TikTok and Instagram, with daily reach in the billions, have become fashion’s primary distribution systems for identity. Trends such as coastal grandmother Barbiecore, or bloke core no longer evolve over seasons; they peak and collapse in weeks, sometimes days. On TikTok, the hashtag #TikTokMadeMeBuylt exceeded 80 billion views by 2025, illustrating how platforms convert fleeting aesthetics into global consumption in real time. A garment can move from factory to influencer feed to landfill within a single quarter.

This dynamic has deep historical roots. Edward Bernays, the so-called grandfather of public relations, demonstrated in the early 30th century how desire could be manufactured to sustain industries well beyond functional need. He understood that to shift from selling products for their function (a dress to cover the body, shoes to protect the feet) to selling them for their symbolic value (a dress that shows you are elegant, contemporary, rebellious, or rich) has a huge pontential. His campaigns -from cigarettes rebranded as “torches of freedom” and “women’s emancipation” to soap promoted through children’s contests - showed that consumption could be engineered as identity.

A manufactured identity performance, constantly shifting, so consumers are compelled to update it with each cycle. This worked perfectly because identity itself is never “finished”. People continually negotiate how they are seen by others - and how they see themselves. Fashion absorbed this lesson early, with advertising and trend forecasting establishing a perpetual appetite for the new. The industry exploits still today this instability. By linking products to ideas like freedom, sophistication, power, or belonging, brands create a sense that buying the garment will give you that identity or help you maintain it.

Byung-Chul Han’s analysis of internalized self-surveillance sharpens the point. Consumers no longer need to be coerced from the outside; they discipline themselves to remain visible, relevant, and desirable in an attention economy. Clothing becomes less a material good than a continuous update of the self. The ecological consequence is systemic: even garments marketed as “sustainable” are swept into this churn, consumed as signs of novelty rather than as long-term investments. Unless this cultural metabolism - the acceleration of identity through consumption - is slowed, material innovation alone will remain insufficient to bring fashion within planetary boundaries. Unless the cycle of accelerated identity-consumption slows, no material innovation (mycelium, algae, microsilk) can keep fashion within ecological limits.

Toward Non-Human-Centred Fashion (© Edie Lou)

Ecological Dignity: Toward Non-Human-Centred Fashion

Fashion today operates within an accelerated cycle of consumer conditioning, where garments are consumed less as durable objects than as tokens in the endless updating of identity. Influencer economies and the internalization of self-surveillance amplify this churn, ensuring that even fibers marketed as sustainable are stripped of ecological advantage by speed and excess. This human-centred loop - consumption as self-performance - is not only a cultural trap but an ecological dead end.

To move beyond this loop requires expanding the frame of reference. Bruno Latour argued that the Anthropocene has collapsed the illusion that culture and nature exist as separate spheres. What humans wear, grow, or discard is inseparable from atmospheric carbon, polluted rivers, and exhausted soils. Donna Haraway sharpened this argument by rejecting fantasies of technological salvation: survival, she insists, depends on “staying with the trouble” and learning to “make-with” non-human actors. Together, their work points to a politics and ethics that no longer centre the human consumer but situate fashion within multispecies entanglements.

Applied to fashion, this means that materials and garments must be evaluated not only for what they signal socially but for how they participate ecologically. Cotton is not just fiber but irrigation, pesticides, and monocultures; polyester is not just fabric but fossil extraction and microplastics; mycelium is not just innovation but fungal networks cultivated within designed environments. To speak of ecological dignity is to insist that the value of fashion cannot be reduced to aesthetics, style, or market price, but must also account for soil, water, animals, atmosphere, and human lifes.

This reframing does not reject innovation - it repositions it. Biofabricated textiles, regenerative fibers, and low-impact processes can indeed contribute to transformation, but only if embedded in a framework that recognizes their ecological relations and imposes limits on speed and scale. Without such a shift, martial innovation risks becoming another performance of identity - performative -, absorbed into the same cycle of overproduction. With it, fashion could begin to model a new kind of cultural and economic system: one grounded not in indulgence or erasure, but in recognition, restraint, and care across both human and non-human worlds.

Policy and Governance: Beyond Transparency

If cultural drivers accelerate excess and ecological dignity requires rethinking fashion’s purpose, governance provides the framework to make that shift material. Yet the industry’s most common response has been voluntary transparency: annual sustainability reports, carbon offset claims, and pledges to “go circular”. Independent audits however, show that disclosure rarely matches practice. The Fashion Transpareny Index (2023) found that the average disclosure rate across 250 of the world’s largest brands was only 26% with little detail on wages, chemical use, or waste streams. Transparency, as currently practiced, functions less as accountability than as reputational management - it makes the system more visible, not more just.

Governments are beginning to challenge this logic. In the European Union, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive and the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulations seek to impose mandatory risk assessments and lifecycle accountability. The forthcoming Digital Product Passport (expected by 2026) will require clothing sold in the EU to carry traceable information on origin, composition, and recyclability. In the United States, New York’s proposed Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability Act gestures in the same direction, while France has already intorduced fines for destroying unsold stock. These interventions treat fashion not as cultural ornamentation but as a global industry with real obligations - one whose environmental and labor impacts rival energy or agriculture.

The effectiveness of these policies will depend on enforcement. Fashion’s supply chains cross dozens of jurisdictions, from cotton farms in India to dye houses in China to assembly in Bangladesh. Unless regulations are internationally coordinated and violations carry binding penalties, loopholes will persist. Data disclosure, too, must be verifiable and actionable: publishing wage information, for example, is meaningless without mechanisms to ensure living wages are paid. Policy must therefore go beyond transparency to internalize costs - through carbon pricing, extended producer responsibility for textile waste, and mandatory wage floors across global supply chains.

Yet structural reform cannot succeed without cultural reform. As long as individuals continue to equate selfhood with consumption, the system will find ways to accelerate. Internalized self-surveillance - the compulsion to remain visible, relevant, and desirable through clothing - sustains the very demand curves regulation seeks to moderate. Governance can slow the system, but consumers must also work on themselves: cultivating identities rooted in values, relationships, and knowledge rather than perpetual updating through commodities. Only when law, capital, material innovation, and culture converge - systemic accountability reinforced by self-reflection and education - can fashion begin to operate within planetary boundaries.

Aligning Innovation, Culture, and Governance (© Edie Lou)

Conclusion: Aligning Innovation, Culture, and Governance

The trajectory of fashion’s ecological response often begins with innovation: new fibers, regenerative practices, and biotechnologies that promise to alleviate the industry’s footpirint. Yet as the preceding chapters have shown, materials alone cannot deliver systemic change. Unless overproduction is curbed, consumption slowed, and value redefined, technological progress risks becoming an alibi for continuity rather than transformation.

Culture is the mediator here. The acceleration of trend cycles and the conditioning of consumers into perpetual novelty ensure that even “sustainable” innovations are absorbed into the same logic of disposability. Without a cultural shift - away from fashion as a performance of identity purchased anew each season and toward a more grounded understanding of value - material innovation cannot see its potential. Governance offers a necessary counterweight. Laws that mandate transparency, regulate waste, and enforce labor rights are essential to break the cycle of voluntary promises without consequence. Yet gouvernance cannot succeed in isolation. Regulation alone, if not supported by cultural change, risks producing compliance that is superficial - companies meeting minimum requirements without transforming underlying practices or values.

At small scales, lab-grown fibers such as mycelium leather or algae yarns appear sustainable: their production is tightly monitored, their inputs relatively modest, and their novelty confers symbolic values. But if scaled under fashion’s existing growth paradigm, they risk becoming the next cotton or polyester. Industrialization would require vast quantities of energy, water, and chemical stabilizers, subjecting these “innovations” to the same extractive pressures that defined mainstream fibers. Without systemic shifts in consumption, regulation, education, and cultural value, scaling biomaterials risks repeating - rather than resolving - the ecological strain that the industry claims to be escaping.

As we can see the future of fashion cannot be secured through fiber innovation alone. While mycelium leather, algae yarns, or protein-based textiles may reduce dependence on cotton monocultures, animal farming, and fossil-based synthetics, they cannot resolve the deeper logic of acceleration, overproduction, and erasure that structures the industry. Without systemic limits, new fibers risk becoming additive rather than substitutive, absorbed into a cycle of novelty that leaves ecological and social costs unchanged. Material innovation is often presented as if fibers exist in isolation, each assessed for its individual footprint. But in reality, every material is embedded in a web of interdependencies: agricultural systems, energy infrastructures, chemical industries, labor markets, and cultural consumption. If fashion keeps treating fiber innovation as a silver bullet, the same pattern will repeat: “green” textiles entering the market only to be scaled into the same extractive metabolism.

The necessary horizon is structural change. First, fashion’s metabolism must slow: production volumes must fall, garment lifetimes must extend, and design cycles must be recalibrated away from disposability. Second, value must be redefined. As long as garments are consumed as identity-updates in a culture of excess, innovation will only legitimize the churn. To shift meaning, garments must be reframed as ecological and social artefacts - products of human skill, cultural history, and material innovation.

The industry must slow down, obviously. It currently produces more garments than the planet can sustain; no fiber innovation can offset this. Binding regulation on overproduction, durability standards, and extended producer responsibility are critical. And, of course, fashion must decouple value from speed and novelty. Repair, longevity, provenance, and fair labor need to carry as much prestige as “newness” once did. That means changing how brands design, how media frames desire, and how consumers evaluate clothing.

Cultural foundation remains the most difficult but most necessary frontier of change. Fashion’s current logic ties selfhood to perpetual consumption: identity is curated, updated, and displayed through garments that are designed to lose relevance quickly. This cycle ensures that even so-called “sustainable” fibers are absorbed into the churn of novelty, undermining their ecological promise. Breaking this logic reqires dismantling the cultural script that equates selfhood with disposability. A more durable future depends on cultivating identities rooted not in commodities but in values, relationships, and knowledge.

The cultural foundation of fashion must shift away from the logic of disposability, that is for sure, where selfhood is constantly updated through new commodities. But in the bottom line: the solution isn’t a miracle fiber. It is a new operating system: slower flow, fair pay, clean chemistry, verified truth, and a broader circle of authorship. Do those together, and fashion can move from deletion to dignity - while retaining its role as a site of creativity and meaning.

https://www.nature.com/articles/461472a

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/44160502_A_safe_operating_space_for_humanity

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1259855

https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html

https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/a-new-textiles-economy

https://globalfashionagenda.org/event/global-fashion-summit-copenhagen-edition-2025/

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/state-of-fashion

https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/retail/our%20insights/fashion%20on%20climate/fashion-on-climate-full-report.pdf

https://pro.refashion.fr/eco-design/sites/default/files/fichiers/Measuring%20Fashion%20Environmental%20Impact%20of%20the%20Global%20Apparel%20and%20Footwear%20Industries%20Study.pdf

https://www.mycoworks.com

https://boltthreads.com

https://boltthreads.com/technology/mylo/