mycelium
Project Overview
I was so incredibly excited to work with mycelium, it’s a material that has been all the rave in the fashion world from start ups in Indonesia making mycelium shoes to fashion houses using mycelium to make leather alternatives. Mycelium was one of those things I had heard about when it first began circulating in the media and what drew me to sustainability in the fashion world. Upon further research, specifically by high couture brand Hermes, I thought it was interesting how they advocated for sustainability and praised in the media for being such a green forward thinking brand, yet they’re most expensive and high selling products, such as their iconic firkin bag, were not offered in mycelium material. This piece is just a, wouldn’t it be funny if we actually made a fully mycelium made hand bag. It’s a critique on fashion but also a personal love letter for the Earth, fashion, and what the future holds for all us “green” materialists out there.
Process
The options I had for creating a mold to grow the mycelium were limited due to time and knowledge of material. I could either make a plastic mold resembling a bikini bag or use some kind of bag that would be deconstructed once the mycelium was grown into the shape of the bag. The plastic mold was the option I was leaning towards however I realized it would be more if a realistic sculpture of a birkin and not have the hallow inside which real purses do, so ultimately I settled on using a bag as a mold. Once again I pulled out my own fake crocodile skin purse (the same one used in the bacterial celluloseproject) and got to work.
**** I would personally like to make note that I bought this Nine West purse from Goodwill a month prior to the bacterial cellulose project and loved it cause it would be my first brown purse and I still hadn’t actually used or worn the purse before any of these projects and used it for the first time 12/16/2025. Anyways-
I lined the purse with a plastic trash bag and lined the bottom and walls of the purse with the mycelium, pre inoculated of course, and used a second trash bag to cover the inside compacted material. This second trash bag inside of the purse was filled with sand so the purse would stay up and keep its shape so the mycelium would grow into the shape of the purse mold while standing upright. The second trash bag filled with sand was large enough to cover the entirety of the outside of the purse which stopped air from coming inside of it to the layer of mycelium. This was important to prevent contamination of the material. I taped it up super good trying to leave as minimal air as possible and let it grow for 12-13 days. I then baked it for 14 hours afterwards. In all honesty, the results were not the greatest. It genuinely looks like sort of just a lump of dirt. Growth was visible though, so that part was successful, and although it did not turn out as expected or planned there is some merit to the results. There is an artist who would make plaster sculptures by using fabric socks as molds. The material would dry of course in these lumpy, odd, weird shapes, because the fabric of the socks would stretch when filled with plaster and it created these sculptures which seemed soft and lumpy with all these soft edged folds which contradicted the hard plaster material they were actually made out of. What makes my lump of dirt different from an actual lump of dirt is the soft folds created by the unstable mold, these folds and round edges were captured in the mycelium. If you look on the inside of my birkin the mycelium also recorded the wrinkles of the plastic bag it was lined with which created an interesting and unexpected texture on the interior of the “bag”.
I can not believe I didn’t take a picture of it in its final form.
Final Thoughts
This is hopefully what is to be the first version of a completely made mycelium birkin bag. In an ideal world I would have somehow constructed an exact replica of the birkin bag with this material and I picture multiples of it. Enough of these mycelium bags to line walls of a designer purse store, and I would sell these mycelium bags, which replicate the most expensive bag in the world, for nothing. A sort of instillation, fashion commentary piece. 🙂
And for the record, despite what most assumed would have to happen, I did NOT have to break apart the purse in any way, shape, or form to take the mycelium out of this ‘mold”. It slid out like a baby.