Cotton without fields, fur and leather without slaughter—yes, there’s a lot of hype around lab-grown fashion, which aims to bypass the environmental impacts of the mimicked “real things”. Propped up by recent investments, startups are under pressure to scale, bring down the costs, and prove the sustainability metrics of these largely untested materials that the industry could soon rely on to meet its ESG goals.
Lab-grown fashion: from the petri dish to the catwalk?
The fashion industry loves a novel concept—the hot new thing that promises to reinvent the way we wear clothes. For over a decade, innovative minds have experimented with recreating cotton, leather, silk, and fur in a lab, hoping to bypass the harmful ecological and social impacts of traditional farming to produce materials that, in theory, mimic the real deal.
Fashion futurists believe that lab-grown materials are far from just an overhyped idea. They see them as an essential solution to existential challenges the industry is facing as a result of the worsening climate emergency.
But the path to growing cotton or leather in a petri dish and scaling it to a commercial level is fraught with barriers that no innovator has yet overcome. Can anyone crack the code, or is the world just not ready for lab-grown materials?
Fashion relies on an increasingly insecure supply of natural materials under threat by the climate crisis. By 2030, it’s predicted that extreme weather events like floods and droughts could impact $65bn worth of clothing exports from fashion manufacturing countries, according to 2023 research by the ILR Global Labor Institute.
The textiles industry is so massive, and it can't sustain the way it’s going.
Dr Kate Hobson-Lloyd – fashion ratings manager at Good On You
And this isn’t just a problem for the future—in 2022, floods destroyed 40% of Pakistan’s cotton crops, devastating a major industry for the country. With the increasing ferocity and prevalence of climate events, along with a growing population and the reduced production capacity of agricultural land, the business case for finding alternative production methods of materials is strong.
Climate crises aside, conventional material supply chains are typically complex and murky, riddled with human rights abuses like child and forced labour, as well as animal rights abuses in the leather and fur sectors. Almost all of fashion’s most-used materials have high carbon footprints, and require vast amounts of water and toxic chemicals in their production.
Despite all this, global fibre production is only increasing—by 2030, it’s expected to rise to 160m tonnes. “The textiles industry is so massive, and it can’t sustain the way it’s going,” says Dr Kate Hobson-Lloyd, fashion ratings manager at Good On You. “Things aren’t slowing down, but something has to give.”
What do lab-grown materials really mean for fashion?
“Lab-grown” is a simplified label for materials that are created through cell cultivation, explains Chelsea Franklin, head of advanced concept design at PANGAIA. The material science company and loungewear brand develops its own materials and partners with other innovators to pilot them through PANGAIA products.
To grow materials in a lab setting, scientists start with cells from a plant or animal and genetically transform them.
For GALY, a lab-grown cotton startup from Boston, this means feeding cotton cells sugar to multiply in a vat, before genetically modifying the cells to elongate into fibres.
3D Bio-Tissues, a UK-based biotech company, collects cells from an adult horse in a painless biopsy procedure to create its lab-grown leather, the first samples of which were unveiled in 2024 at the Future Fabrics Expo in London. Similarly, Netherlands company Qorium creates lab-grown sheets of collagen that are tanned and transformed into leather.
Since 2022, LVMH, Imperial College London, and Central Saint Martins University have been developing lab-grown fur by combining keratin and yeast to produce fibres. It’s a similar fermentation process that the team behind Spiber, a Japanese material technology company, use to create Brewed Protein fibre.
“This is an incredibly exciting space with huge potential,” says Franklin. “By using nature as a factory, innovators can develop groundbreaking solutions without relying on traditional agriculture.”
Scaling pains: it’s expensive from R&D to consumer product
In 2024, Spiber released its first product with Burberry—a scarf that contains 30% Brewed Protein fibre. Spiber remains the only startup producing publicly available products so far, having also launched products and capsule collections with Woolrich, Margaret Howell, The North Face and others in the last six months.
For most innovators, the reality is that research, development, and production are time-consuming and expensive, especially given the cost of setting up dedicated machines and factories to produce entirely new products. “One of the challenges I have seen innovators who are pursuing cell cultivation face is fundraising the significant capital investment required to build the infrastructure for scaling,” says Franklin. “This is a completely new way of producing materials and it will take both time and capital to develop the equipment and facilities to support the production of new materials.”
In recent years, a number of lab-grown innovations have folded, including Bolt Thread’s MYLO leather alternative and Kering-backed VitroLabs, a Californian biotech start-up that appears to have quietly shuttered in 2024.
One of the challenges I have seen innovators who are pursuing cell cultivation face is fundraising the significant capital investment required to build the infrastructure for scaling.
Chelsea Franklin – head of advanced concept design at PANGAIA
“At the end of the day, it all comes down to the cost of these materials,” says Hobson-Lloyd. “If you want to survive, you need to make something that can hit the mass market, which means you have to get your production volume and pricing right.”
Novel materials struggle to attract early adopters
Fashion, unlike consumer tech, doesn’t draw many early adopters for novel materials—you don’t see queues for Burberry’s Spiber scarf like you do for a new Apple product.
The high cost and unpredictable quality, feel, and durability, as well as the fickle nature of trends could contribute to the consumer indifference to innovative materials. “It is a huge challenge just to convince customers to change their shopping habits and consume less but better,” says Hobson-Lloyd. “So your average person is not going to be interested in forking out loads of money for a bag made from a material that they’re not experts in.”
Despite a perceived lack of consumer demand, the sector has seen investment from global brands that will rely on burgeoning innovators to meet their preferred material targets. Last year, Spiber closed a JPY ¥10bn (US$65m) funding round, while H&M and Inditex became major investors in GALY, joining a $33m Series B funding round. H&M has committed to sourcing only recycled or more responsible materials by 2030, and with only five years to go, we can assume that the pressure will be on GALY to make its vat-grown cotton commercially available quickly.
Is the optimism for lab-grown materials misplaced?
One thing is for sure, it’s unlikely to be smooth sailing to scale. As we often hear said about proposed solutions in the sustainability sector, Franklin emphasises that collaboration and adaptability are crucial qualities for innovators, their investors, and other partners to navigate this successfully. “We understand the complexities of scaling new materials, so we take a flexible approach to development, working closely with innovators and suppliers to navigate challenges as they arise, recognising that things don’t always go to plan,” she says.
Naturally, lab-grown materials will face the same sustainability scrutiny and expectations that conventional materials do, says Hobson-Lloyd. “Innovators still need to think about where their energy comes from, what chemicals are being used, how long the material will last,” she says. “They’re not immune to the issues that conventional producers face.”
Naturally, lab-grown materials will face the same sustainability scrutiny and expectations that conventional materials do.
But the innovators rethinking the fibre portfolio of fashion continue to express optimism despite the challenges. “I’m confident that these materials will scale,” says Franklin. “We’ve already seen significant progress from the innovators we work with, so I believe lab-grown materials have a strong future in the industry.”
Is it likely you’ll be walking into a store and buying lab-grown products in the next five years? Perhaps not. But expect to hear more about lab-grown startups as the market puts pressure on them to deliver.
