This Hermès Bag is Partly Made From Mushrooms

The French luxury fashion house Hermès has just announced the upcoming release of a new iteration of its famous Victoria bag… this time in mushroom leather.

This brand-new piece of fungal fashion has sprouted out of the top-secret collaboration between Hermès and MycoWorks, a San Francisco-based biomaterials company that weaves sustainable vegan leather from the root fibres of mushrooms.

While many claim this collaboration is a monumental step towards sustainability for the leather-bound luxury fashion giant, you might find the truth a little less inspiring. Read on for the low-down on Hermès X MycoWorks and decide for yourself whether this collaboration is a hopeful sign of a more sustainable future in luxury fashion.

What is MycoWorks?

MycoWorks is a privately owned bio-textile company that was founded by Philip Ross and Sophia Wang in 2013 and is headquartered in California’s home of the start-up, San Francisco. Despite the company’s youth, the idea behind harvesting fibres and structural materials from mushrooms goes back many years.

In the 1990s, co-founder and current CTO Philip Ross first developed an interest in the field of mycology. And thus, he began exploring the artistic capacity of different types of fungus. Over the next few decades, he went on to produce mushroom-based bricks, rigid objects and fibres, ultimately pioneering a new design concept which he named ‘Mycotecture’.

Fast-forward to today and MycoWorks’ developmental focus is on a vegan leather alternative—made from the interlaced thread-like roots of fungus—which the company calls Reishi Fine Mycelium. This material is grown in large sheets in the dark, mild and humid conditions of the company’s San Francisco factory and is fed with organic waste materials. CEO Matt Scullin explains the process to design magazine, Cool Hunting: “While our material is growing, we coerce the mycelium cells into a woven structure. This gives it much more strength and durability. After we harvest, we can then go into tanning.”

It’s a process that consumes far fewer resources than the production of raw leather, in addition to being cruelty-free. The tanning process is also much more sustainable than the industry standard. MycoWorks’ tanning partners treat the raw Reishi textile with vegetable-based tanning products and turn out a material that virtually matches the durability, look and feel of cowhide leather.

But What About the Hermès X MycoWorks Bag?

Hermès is currently enjoying lavish praise from many big names in fashion media following the announcement of its collaboration with MycoWorks. And although the words “sustainable” “cruelty-free” and “vegan” are being thrown around, the truth is that Hermès does little to earn this praise with its upcoming Victoria bag.

The most important thing to get out of the way is that this bag is absolutely not vegan. Nor is it cruelty-free.

The straps of the bag are made from Hermès’ house-made leather product called Evercalf, a calfskin leather prized for its unrivalled softness. The harvesting of calfskin, as well as many other facets of the leather and hide industry, has been decried for decades as cruel and abusive by numerous international organisations and journals.

And although Hermès has taken steps to reassure the public of its high ethical standards, the company has been embroiled in several ethical scandals for the last few years, relating to the cruelty of its leather supplying partners and the horrific scale of its own leather farms.

What’s more, the Hermès X MycoWorks bag wasn’t developed with the sustainable Reishi Fine Mycelium material in mind. The fashion house worked closely with MycoWorks to produce an altogether new mycelium leather material the companies call Sylvania. This material is not processed under the same ethical and environmental standards as Reishi but is instead shipped to Hermès facilities for in-house tanning, a manufacturing process responsible for enormous environmental damage and fresh-water waste.

For many compassionate animal lovers who also love high-fashion, it is understandably a sign of hope to see animal leather replaced by more sustainable and ethical alternatives, especially under the auspices of an enormous leather goods producer like Hermès. Now more than ever, though, it is important that the claims these companies make towards their sustainability are given serious scrutiny. If not, then all it takes are lukewarm gestures to environmentalism and eco-publicity to get companies off the hook for their ongoing cruelty and harm to the world.

Did you know: Algae could be the biodegradable fabric of the future.