Dress made of living mycelium can renew and repair itself | Hacker News Reader

Dress made of living mycelium can renew and repair itself

dezeen.com

92 pointsspeckx53 comments

The claim in the article that saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewer's yeast) naturally produced the deep blue color in the butterfly example is not actually true, although it's a gorgeous effect.

These are genetically engineered variants of brewer's yeast designed to produce pigments.

Wow you weren’t kidding that’s a beautiful color

You can buy this color for 3€/meter at any weekend fabric market.

You could, but getting it from pigments in a chitinous matrix produced by genetically engineered brewer's yeast is just a little bit cooler.

I think they're saying that's exactly what you're buying for 3€/yd.

No, I'm saying if the color is the only part you want, you can get it more easily.

Ok? I just think it’s neat.

I wonder if there is a health hazard wearing this due to breathing in spores or toxins released into the air? Or perhaps there is a risk that the wearer will absorb harmful chemicals secreted by the mycelium via contact with the wearer's skin? Very interesting none the less. I have imagined humans making living clothes for a long time, so it is nice to see that idea materialize.

It seems telling that none of the photos show anyone wearing it.

"Following drying at 45 degrees, the material is not quite living and not quite dead, but instead in a "low-metabolic, dormant-like state", Li told Dezeen, meaning it is not actively growing."

Don't think spores will be an issue since it's not the mycelium's sex organ mushroom that you're thinking of

It depends on the species. Some fungi like molds do directly sporulate from the mycelium.

From TFA: "These are mixed in with the cordyceps militaris"

"Many authors consider C. militaris quite common, spread throughout the Northern Hemisphere,[6] and fruiting bodies appear in Europe from August to November."[0]

That sounds like a mushroom to me

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordyceps_militaris

> Or perhaps there is a risk that the wearer will absorb harmful chemicals secreted by the mycelium via contact with the wearer's skin?

Or just getting a bad itch.

Some people are very allergic to mushrooms. I wonder if that would extend to this.

But it's pretty cool.

Spoken like a true patriot!

Obviously, us american's need to wear and use everything made from oil, because it's so safe...

I would buy one, but I don’t think I have mushroom in my wardrobe for it.

Soylent queen

> nutrient solution is applied over a hole, along with a small patch of fresh fungus

So, not repair itself.

To be fair it only claimed "near self-repairing".

The headline is more ambitious, that's probably what they meant

One could think of it as mostly self-repairing with some outside encouragement.

Nope. "Dress made of living mycelium can renew and repair itself".

Does the fresh fungus need to be genetically identical? I read something about mycelial nuclei in high school and it was weird.

I guess they're just trying to get the networks to interlace, not to reconstitute into a single organism and be capable of nutrient exchange, so I don't think it matters if they're identical or not.

Exactly. You can place a patch with some glue over a hole in fabric to achieve the same thing in a traditional garment. Iron-on repair patches are also similar.

It's one thing to say "get it wet and leave it in the sun". It's another thing to require identical replacement material and nutrient slurry (I don't know about you, but I think I can source fabric glue more easily than potato water).

Well you gotta recharge it of course, just not with a power cord.

How does it smell though?

Most people associate mushrooms and fungi with the smell of their substrate; they commonly don't have a strong smell themselves

I doubt it has a smell stronger than the wearer

edit: this is a bad take, upon further research

Chanterelles smell great. I would wear something that smelled like that.

Pine mushrooms, not so much.

I've done cultures on agar agar and mycelium definitely does have a distinctive smell. To me it's reminiscent to the damp smell of a concrete basement, though less stale and unpleasant.

The mushroom smell isn't from either the substrate or respiration. That distinct odor is 1-octen-3-ol. Biochemists call it "mushroom alcohol." It's caused by enzymatic breakdown of their cell walls, and it thought to be related to signalling.

I doubt it would be strongly present here. The article says the mycelium are close to dormant.

You can actually purchase mushroom alcohol commercially as a food additive.

I didn’t think of the smell at all, I was wondering what the feel was like. There’s a certain level of comfort that’s expected from clothing that matters. There’s also the question of breathability. Is it going to trap sweat and smells like polyester clothing?

If you sweat in this though, would it grow from the moisture or get killed off by the salinity? either way could lead to new and unexpected failure modes for clothing

probably smells like patchouli

I put a load of washing on, then ended up in hospital for a year.

On return, the contents of the washing machine were pretty much this.

Sounds like quite an ordeal, hope things are going well now.

Is there an adjective for something that's nifty but also gross?

I'm not sure it's any more objectively gross than normal textile materials. Imagine you lived in a hairless, furless world where nothing like wool was a thing, and then suddenly we discovered a weird fluffy mammal that extruded long fibers out of its flesh; the people of that world might call that gross, we'd just call it ordinary.

Blursed!

Mr Stamets (both real AND fictional) must be proud as heck!

Is there a possibility of the organisms escaping the material and infesting the environment? That's what I would worry about with mycelium.

Could they make a house out of this?

It doesn't seem to have the rigidity to be structurally sound for construction.

my tent material doesn't have rigidity to it either. if we change out the word "house", it could be an interesting material to play with for other types of shelter. it's supposed to be hydrophobic, but how hydrophobic? a light spritz or spilled drink or holds up in the rain?

https://constructionindustrytoday.co.uk/2026/06/01/mykor-clo...

Cordyceps, huh? An interesting choice! And ironically the subject of an article on Ars Technica that just dropped...

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/parasitic-zombie-fun...

How is that ironic?

I'm guessing that the OP didn't know about the Ars article when they posted. Perhaps "serendipitously" would have been a better word?

Past the 'look at me I'm lady gaga' honeymoon phase, being forced to store our clothes in a fridge will not help with our energy bills.

Or we could put an 'almost dormant' fungus inside our dark and warm drawers and closets, lying close to the other clothes and shoes for months and months. What could go wrong?.

Researchers in China have created a textile from living mycelium that is self-cleaning, near self-repairing and can be coloured or made UV protective through "plug-and-play" add-ons of different fungi or yeast.

near self-repairing

This would turn into a mould infested nightmare

Pretty disgusting tbh.

Neat. Wearing some hibernating Cordyceps clothes seems like a good way to speedrun some life-imitates-art The Last of Us gain of function research.

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