Understanding the Power of Mycelium and the Mushroom Movement | BoF VOICES 2021
The Business of Fashion Podcast
The Business of Fashion
4.6 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 4 February 2022
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
One of the planet’s oldest lifeforms was the centrepiece of some of last year’s biggest stories in material innovation in fashion. But beyond fungi’s potential for shaping the future of materials, its ability to build things and create networks can provoke our imaginations and make us question the way we organise our lives, according to Merlin Sheldrake, biologist and author of “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures.”
Download our latest Case Study: ‘Fashion’s Race for New Materials’ here
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, this is Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Business of Fashion. |
| 0:08.1 | Welcome to the BOF podcast. It's Friday, February 4th. |
| 0:12.1 | Earlier this week, we released our latest case study, exclusively for BOF professionals, called |
| 0:17.9 | Fashion's Race for New Materials. Indeed, fashion brands are pursuing a raft of |
| 0:23.5 | initiatives to adopt recycled textiles, regeneratively farmed cotton, and of course, mushroom-based |
| 0:30.5 | leather, which comes from mycelium, and all of this was front of mind at Voices 2021, where we had one |
| 0:37.3 | of the world's foremost mycologists |
| 0:39.3 | Merlin Sheldrake, along with Matthew Scullin from MicroWorks, and Andrew and Simon |
| 0:45.2 | Salter from the mushroom-based tea company, Dirty, in conversation with B.O.F. Sarah Kent, |
| 0:51.3 | to talk about how innovation and fashion doesn't come just in the form of new |
| 0:55.1 | technologies, but it also can come from the planet's oldest natural life forms, mushrooms. |
| 1:01.6 | To dive in on this topic, I'm pleased to share this talk from Voices 2021, first from Merlin |
| 1:07.6 | Sheldrake, followed by our panel of experts to understand the incredible |
| 1:12.2 | healing power of mushrooms for our physical and mental health and how the science of fungi |
| 1:18.1 | is changing the fashion industry. |
| 1:20.8 | The theme of this event I'm informed is human connections, which I think is a very prescient |
| 1:25.9 | theme for this moment and time. And so it feels appropriate to be talking about fungi, who are connectors. |
| 1:33.3 | Fungi weave their bodies into relation with themselves, with their physical environments, and with other organisms. |
| 1:41.3 | My exploration of these entanglements has caused me to rethink much of what I thought I knew. |
| 1:48.0 | Fungi trick us out of our preconceptions, |
| 1:51.0 | and they invite us to question some of the categories, |
| 1:55.0 | often very tired categories, |
... |
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