Growing up, both my dad and brother were obsessed with listening to podcasts. No matter where we were, or what we were doing, they would always turn to each other and discuss the latest Ted Talk or the newly proposed life-changing ideas shared about economics. I never understood the hype around podcasts, and for me, the life of a 16-year-old girl took up way too much of my time to even explore the activity to begin with. However, despite my lack of interest in the overall concept, my brother persisted in trying to make the idea sound more appealing and continued to encourage me to become more open to the idea. It took almost two years for his words to finally stick, as I found myself spending the first couple weeks of college with my AirPods in my ears and had run out of music to shuffle through before August was even over. After listening to all my Daily Mixes and skimming over my old playlists, I hesitantly decided to click on the podcast section of the Spotify app as I walked back from class.
Within seconds, my screen began to fill up with all sorts of different images and title names, each subsection dominated by clever catchphrases and small-worded temptations such as “How to write a perfect college essay your professor will love,” to try and attract listeners. After scrolling through the various categories and sorting out my options in accordance with my personal interests, I soon found myself staring face-to-face at a Ted Talk about the future of fashion. However, this wasn’t just any regular lecture about how unsustainable our generation’s fashion habits have been and continue to be. This speech, given and researched by Dan Widmaier, was about how we can use nature to create more sustainable alternatives for making materials like leather. However, Dan’s whole presentation focused on how mushrooms could be the single most important factor in how the future of our fashion industry can be saved. Now, this, was a shock to me, as I had spent most of my childhood staring into every store window and watching every movie there was about fashion. I read magazines and took classes outside of school, even developing my own personality trait of being obsessed with clothes and the evolutionary styles that change every season. The relationship I had with fashion meant that I knew on a personal level that there was no way to solve the harmful environmental crisis that the fashion industry has on the world in a timely manner. Or at least I thought.
Within the first few minutes of the Ted Talk, Dan Widmaier goes into explaining his key idea as well as highlighting his plans on how “We can make fashion sustainable, and we’re going to do it with science.” He addressed one of the most problematic materials in the fashion industry; leather. That is linked directly to one of the most harmful processes of raising cattle, since cows, on a global scale, are terrible for our environmental future. He then introduced us to the alternative biodegradable material that he called Mylo, which both looks good and isn’t harmful to the environment. According to the CFDA, Mylo is defined as a leather-like material, made from mycelium, which is the underfoot of a mushroom.
However, the fact that Dan had created a sustainable alternative for leather based on the structural roots of mushrooms wasn’t the most impressive part. For me, it was at this point in the podcast when I thought I had just wasted a whole six minutes of my life listening to a random man named Dan come up with a really cool alternative for fabrics. We had already covered the benefits and worked through the costs, summing up to be some of the most positive information I had heard all day. But it was at this six-minute benchmark when Dan and I both knew, that even though his idea was incredible, it would take years, maybe even centuries for the fashion industry to fully incorporate his idea into their styles and start mass producing it in textile factories around the world. This was the one problem that single-handedly squashed every environmental scientist, specialist, and activist’s dream of trying to save the planet. The fact that we don’t have enough time to act upon these brilliant ideas to try and change as much as we want to change in order to save the planet left me feeling very sorry for Dan. This feeling lasted for almost eight whole seconds, as I carried on listening to him, only to discover that his idea had already been incorporated into the fashion industry and was currently being mass-produced while he stood there talking to us. Brands such as Stella McCarthy, Lululemon, and Adidas were integrating the Mylo material into many of their products. Adidas redesigned the Stan Smith with Mylo and Stella McCarthy designed the frame Mylio handbag, presenting it on the Paris runway. Dan went on to describe how these highly competitive and exclusive brands had to work with each other to solve this problem together.
As I grew closer to the end of Dan’s podcast, I was very much surprised by what I had heard and focused on how I would have probably never been able to hear that information anywhere else. The type of impression Dan’s eleven-minute speech left on me has not only made me a lot more curious about the fashion industry overcoming the hard sustainability crisis but it’s made me a little bit more keen to explore the world of podcasts much more than I would of before.
The link to the podcast is down below:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5L4Xe619lh0MM1nYNNwGV1?si=a35a28f452934902