–Katya Moorman + KL Dunn
There’s a wallet in Gwen Sanchirico’s lab that she used for four years. It’s made from mushroom and agar. It’s holding up fine.
Sanchirico is a technologist in FIT’s Department of Science and Math, and she runs what might be the most important room in fashion education right now — a growing Biomaterials Reference Library tucked into the eighth floor of the Feldman Center, where petri dishes of materials made from orange peel, avocado skin, spent tea leaves, eggshells, and kombucha cellulose are organized in drawers like a cabinet of living curiosities. There’s a shimmering purple swatch dyed with cochineal and mica that looks like something from another planet. There’s a thick, flexible material made from wool and agar — you could make a bag out of it, she says, matter-of-factly.
She’s right. You could.
L-R: petri dish with yellow sample made from orange peels and agar, gelatin biomaterial with sari silk waste, agar with sparkly iron bits
This matters because right now, the default material for most emerging fashion designers is polyester. The argument is always the same: natural and alternative materials cost more. And that’s true. But it’s also a habit — one that gets wired in early, during school, when students are making their first creative decisions.
Approximately two-thirds of all garments produced today are made from fossil fuel-derived synthetics. That number isn’t going down on its own. The designers being trained right now are the ones who will either change it or perpetuate it.
Which is what makes Sanchirico’s library so quietly radical.
Every sample comes with a recipe. Every recipe is open source. The whole thing runs on what she calls a democratizing mission: biomaterials don’t require a lab. You can do this at home. The ingredients are safe. Some are literally food-grade. The barrier isn’t technical, and — crucially — it isn’t financial. Orange peels, eggshells, spent tea leaves, silk remnants recovered from a factory floor. The waste stream is free.
Sanchirico came to biomaterials through an unlikely route: running a commercial microwbrewery in England, then researching kombucha cellulose — the Scoby, that rubbery culture that grows on top of fermented tea — as a leather substitute. From there she went deep: agar, sodium alginate, gelatin, starches, casein. She took an online workshop with a designer-scientist in Mexico City during the pandemic. She started experimenting at home, in her kitchen, with whatever was at hand.
“I always have,” she says. “As a child, I wanted to be an astronomer. Then a botanist. Then an astrophysicist. I just love science. And I love art.”
That combination is exactly what makes the library unusual. This isn’t a materials science collection in the traditional sense — it’s a maker’s archive. And it pushes back against a particular idea of what innovation looks like.
L-R: Spirulina-green gelatin “stained glass”, gelatin/burlap and gelatin/flax fiber strips lying on agar and yerba mate biomaterial, (orange) sodium alginate-based biomaterial (with orange mica and safflower petals)
We tend to imagine the future of sustainable materials as high-tech: lab-grown, venture-backed, years from market. What Sanchirico is doing is the opposite. It’s deceptively low-tech, immediate, and replicable. A fashion student who visits her lab on a Tuesday could be casting their own material by the weekend.
She’s currently propagating yellow root on five acres in the Adirondacks because she wants a regional dye practice. She sources mica from a cosmetics supplier that provides safety data sheets. She uses butterfly pea powder for blue, spirulina for green, turmeric for gold. She’s working on a nontoxic black — “a red so dark it looks black,” she says, holding up a cochineal-dyed swatch. She’s experimenting with natural wax coatings for waterproofing, so the material can eventually hold up to real use, in real weather, in real clothes.
The scale question — the one that derails so many sustainable materials conversations — doesn’t faze her. These recipes are simple. Once you dial in the right formula for your environment and your materials, you can cast large. And the long view is actually reassuring: humans have been doing versions of this forever. The Egyptians used gelatin as furniture glue. WWII-era mills spun casein protein into silk-like fabric when conventional supply chains collapsed. We know how to make things from what we have. We just stopped.
“It’s kind of like a reboot.” Sanchirico says of the long arc of material innovation.
What’s different now is that fashion students are standing at an open door during the specific window when their material habits are being formed. School is precisely the moment to experiment — when cost isn’t the only constraint, when a project doesn’t have to go to production, when you can make something that fails and learn from it. That’s the opportunity here. Not just to learn that biomaterials exist, but to get your hands in them, to smell a mango leather sample, to understand that a wallet can be made from mushrooms and hold up for four years.
Jars of kombucha produce SCOBYs to be used in making biomaterials
Sanchirico has been bringing samples into classrooms on a cart. She’s working on a continuing education course proposal. She’s applying for a grant that would fund an assistant. She’s doing most of this on her own time, out of pocket, because she believes it matters — and because she’s noticed that once students actually touch the materials, something shifts.
The library is available to any student or faculty member who wants a hands-on session. You go in, you touch things, you smell them. You find the one that interests you. She gives you the recipe.
Then you go home and make something.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. And it might be exactly what fashion education needs right now.
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