A Future Made From Mushrooms

Where We’re Going

Close your eyes and imagine this: in the not too distant future, you are in your home, getting ready for the day. You stir a cup of mushroom coffee that leaves you feeling balanced and energized. The wall on which you lean is made from mycelium bricks. You flick your lightswitch and turn off a dome light that was grown from the roots of mushrooms and slide into shoes made of mycelium leather. Everything around you is natural, sustainable, and infused with the engineering and artistic genius of mushrooms. Sounds nice, right? Our vision for a sustainable, integrated, creative future is in the midst of being made right now, as scientists, ecologists, healthcare practitioners, farmers, artists, engineers, and chefs tap into the potential of fungi.

Art

The complex beauty of the fungal form has captivated artists for millennia. Their shapes, colors, and metaphysical nature are being depicted in art and sculpture more than ever. German artist Anselm Kiefer centered mushrooms in his 2016 retrospective and Austrian artist Sonja Bäumel elevates other beings like bacteria and fungi to the same level of consideration as the human body. Artists like Xiaojing Yan and Nour Mobarak are using mushrooms themselves as medium, making sculptures with both mycelium and active, growing fungi that consume and interact with other incorporated materials and substrates.

Fashion

Fashion not only draws color palette possibilities from mushrooms (see some of this natural dye work in action), but also new forms of textiles entirely. Artist, textile designer, and biofabricator Aniela Hoitink has designed fully fungal dresses and developed multiple mycelium materials evoking leather and paper mâché. Belgian shoe designer and consultant Kristel Peters experiments with growing her own mycelium materials for shoes.

Big name brands have got in on the action. Working with biotech company Bolt Threads leather-like mycelium textile, Mylo™, Adidas shroomed out their classic Stan Smith sneakers. Lululemon used Mylo™ to make bags and yoga mats in 2021, and Stella McCartney crafted a luxury handbag with the material in 2022. Hermés partnered with MycoWorks to create a travel bag with their patented mycelium tech. Fashion studio Yume Yume and MycoWorks made the experience of fashion made from natural materials even larger-than-life with “Living Mycelium Dunes,” an art installation featuring their Reishi™ “leather” that grows in front of your eyes. Not only is finding alternatives to environmentally costly textiles like leather appealing to fashion brands and consumers, but the completely original materiality offers new form and function for the fashion world to clothe the future.

Product Design, Architecture, & Engineering

In addition to versatility and sustainability, “characteristics like water repellency, buoyancy, strength and elasticity” make fungi power prime for solving all sorts of engineering challenges and creating alternatives to clay, wood, and plastic. The same biotech companies assisting fashion designers are working with car designers like Mercedes Benz and Cadillac on rethinking their leather seats. Aniela Hoitink and designer Marc Th. van der Voorn collaborated on a mycelium lamp. MushLume is a Brooklyn-based design studio that grows mycelium light fixtures. As part of an art installation, biomedical engineer Viktorija Makarovaite and a team of scientists invented the next generation of batteries—powered by mushrooms. Bioarchitect David Benjamin displayed the potential for building with mycelium “bricks” in his installation at Moma PS1 in 2014. Producing the bricks “required no energy and produced no waste or by-products” and once the exhibition was over, the bricks were composted.

Swapping for more sustainable materials is the eternal quest for brands looking to package their products with something protective but biodegradable. Companies like Mushroom Material, Magical Mushroom, and Ecovative’s Mushroom Packaging have developed mycelium based packaging components so we can someday say goodbye to Styrofoam packing peanuts forever.

Mycelium can be used to make insulation, furniture, and countless other constructions, but it also can be used to deconstruct. Mycoremediation is a new technique that harnesses fungi’s unique ability to decompose in order to tackle tough disposal jobs like cleaning up oil spills, decontaminating soil, and filtering water.

Health, Wellness, and Beauty

Walk into any health food store and you will find shelves dedicated to products containing functional and adaptogenic mushrooms for health and wellness. Reishi, Cordyceps, and Chaga, and many more, long used in Traditional Chinese Medicine, are sold in numerous forms for ingesting, from gummies, capsules, and tinctures to being incorporated in our daily foods and beverages, like chocolate and coffee. Their anti-inflammatory and hydrating properties (again, long known in traditional medicine) have made them a trendy ingredient in topical formulas for skin and hair care, as well.

Sustainable Eating

In the produce aisle, the shroom boom continues. The global mushroom market has steadily been growing over the last decade and was worth over 50 billion dollars in 2021. The New York Times named them ingredient of the year in 2022. The umami of mushrooms provides fresh culinary interest in lieu of meat for vegan and vegetarian diets and for all diets as Western palates catch up.

Onward

If you look a little closer, you’ll start to see mushrooms, or at least their potential everywhere. The future may depend on our industries and artistic practices experimenting with, developing, and rediscovering their connection to fungi.