This is where the politics actually sits — not in the materials themselves, but in what they do to the production model. A garment that decays over time cannot be owned the same way. A coat grown from bacteria has a different relationship to value than one cut from hide. The instability is not a flaw in the system. It is a structural argument against a system built on permanence.
Suzanne Lee understood this early. The kombucha leather jackets and shoes she produced through Biocouture were grown in vats, dried flat, formed into shape. They decompose. They leave no residue. The value is in the conditions required to produce them — the time, the organism, the specific knowledge — not in the object’s durability. For an industry that has always priced permanence above process, this is a different proposition entirely. What you are buying, with a Biocouture piece, is not the garment. It is the argument the garment was grown to make.
Janine Gorsche takes the same instability and directs it toward the body. In PATH, she hand-paints organic liquid latex layer by layer, building a surface that absorbs traces of the wearer’s skin, sweat, movement. The material does not age — it records. Each garment is an index of the body that wore it: where it bent, where it pressed, where it was held. This is not a design choice that exists within the logic of fashion. It is a different logic entirely — one in which the garment is completed by the wearer over time, not finished before it reaches them. The latex does not accommodate the body. It is altered by it.
