Name: From fungi to fabric: eco-friendly fashion
Uploaded: 2025-11-17T09:35:04.742Z
Duration: 4 min 42 s
Description: Researcher Annah-Ololade Sangosanya produces artificial leather from mushrooms. Her vision — creating clothing from an organic material that can repair itself.

Researcher Annah-Ololade Sangosanya produces artificial leather from mushrooms. Her vision — creating clothing from an organic material that can repair itself.

Brussels

Ana Ololade Sogossoña, a bioengineer at Brussels Free University, is developing sustainable fashion by creating textiles from mycelium, the root system of fungi. Her fungus-based leather is both waterproof and biodegradable, and she envisions future materials that can self-repair, mimicking living organisms. 

Ana's innovative work has been showcased at Milan Design Week and is supervised by Professor Elisa Elzakka, who praises her transition from science to design. Motivated by environmental concerns over textile waste, Ana advocates for a circular approach to fashion, though her creations are not yet ready for mass production.

From fungi to fabric: eco-friendly fashion

Fashion made from living organisms? Ana Ololade Sogossoña is doing just that. She's made this jacket out of fungus. I'm actually quite proud, yes indeed, of this. It was kind of a big challenge that I took. Ana's fungus leather is waterproof and biodegradable. Her vision is of an intelligent material that can heal itself like a living organism. But more on that later. At the Brussels Free University, the bioengineer shows us how she creates the organic textiles. So this is a mycelium skin. So this is basically only mushroom. It's ready to be harvested, so I just drew it on the liquid surface and now I'm just like taking it out so that we can make a material out of it later. It all started in this petri dish. In her lab, Ana reproduces the underground root system of the mycelium fungus, which normally grows in the woods. The tiny threads grow and weave themselves together into this artificial leather skin in just three weeks. I'm always excited to harvest the skin and trying to see, like, did anything different happen from the previous times? Trying to understand why. And I actually really like these very hands-on parts. Yeah, just touching and getting my hands dirty. She separates the skin from its jelly layer, a bit like separating real leather from its fat. The surface has to be even and smooth in order to make clothing out of it later. I'm treating the skin with some natural product. It's called glycerol, in order to keep it flexible. Just like a leaf, if it falls and it dies, it becomes brittle and very dry. And that's the same kind of thing that will happen to the skin if I don't add this product to it. I just wanted to keep it flexible and fresh like if it were alive. The key word is alive. Ana's vision goes even further. Imagine you rip your jacket and it has some dormant units in there that can revive in a structured way so that it just repairs the wounds. That would be one of our goals, and that's something that is currently being researched. Her idea of making clothing out of living fungi has gained Ana international recognition. Her fungus jacket was exhibited at Milan Design Week in 2025, introducing her invention to a wider audience. It's important to make things that are aesthetically pleasing or that have a specific aesthetic so that people start thinking, oh, wow, this is a new material, but this is how it could be used. It could look good, and it's also biodegradable. Professor Elisa Elzakka is supervising Ana's project. I'm super proud about Ana because it's really where a scientist moves into a completely different other field, which is design. She was able to really do that transition to bring it to a design exhibition, which is super renowned. So where does Ana's boundless motivation come from? The young French-Nigerian woman knows firsthand how much of Europe's discarded clothing ends up in West African landfills. Instead of having a linear thing where you produce something that never degrades and then you just end up having it in the landfill, you biosource it, you use it, and then it biodegrades and gets back to nature. At home, Ana works on new designs, but getting here wasn't easy. Her parents wanted her to study something serious, bioengineering. Today, her creations combine science and fashion. Now that I think about it, I'm super happy of where I have come. I'm very happy to go to work every day. It's a very privileged position. And that's also the advantage of being at the intersection of two domains that are so different, like biology and design. I get to do some things that are very niche, and that's something that I really love. Although her fashion is not yet ready for mass production, Ana's journey proves that the future of fashion can be sustainable and innovative, as well as stylish.

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