Alexander McQueen is one of Central Saint Martins' star alumni. The designer, who tragically died in 2010, is held up by students at the legendary fashion establishment as a design hero. One student hasn't just been inspired by the late designers’ genius however; she has embarked on a project to see if she could use DNA as a fabric.
Tina Gorjanc, a recent graduate from Slovenia, developed the idea of creating a collection made from ‘human leather,’ which is made in a laboratory using McQueen’s DNA. McQueen used his own hair in the labels of his first collection, and the owner of these pieces has agreed to give Gorjanc one hair in order to extract his genetic information for her research.
The student submitted this concept as part of her final project for her Central Saint Martins degree in June, creating prototype backpacks and jackets using pig skins. She then worked in the lab to create test samples of 'leather' made from McQueen's DNA, to see if the technology would even enable this to even happen.
Explaining the science
"You use a process which is called de-extinction, in which a biological agent is applied to the hair in the form of liquid and you extract certain genetic information from it," Gorjanc explains to The Telegraph, "and then you use that information to reprogram already existing skin so it is the exact texture and colour and everything of the original source, so in this case McQueen's skin. It also depends on how much the hair sample is preserved as to how much information you can extract - fortunately McQueen's hair was preserved in a good state."
"You can grow the skin using different techniques," Gorjanc elaborates. "We did it in a Petri dish in the laboratory, and you put liquid treatments and nutrients on the skin so it expands. After that when you want to create leather out of it, you actually need to kill the cells and the first layer and so apply a lot of heat onto it to preserve it. When the material is done and you have leather."
She adds: "This process protects the biological information so you are not able to extract any more biological information from the leather, because the cells are dead. It is a typical technique that they use for any other leather." You could also use bio-printing to create this material, but that is more expensive.
The finished product looks like the leather you buy in the shops now, she claims. "While the skin is growing in the laboratory, it doesn’t really look like skin, because we are are just growing the first two layers of the skin. Visually, when you tan it and apply colouration to it, it can look just like leather," Gorjanc says.
The ethics behind the project
Of course this process throws up a number of serious ethical questions, but that is Gorjanc's intention. "The project is about how our biological information isn't protected, there are huge gaps in legislation because the technologies are evolving so quickly," the fashion student tells The Telegraph, "because of those loop holes we are able to extract genetic information from a human source- and it can be someone else's - and then produce something out of it like a product and then patent it. When you do that you patent material, that is including someone else's genetic information, which is an interesting concept."
Gorjanc has applied for a patent application for this project, because she says the fact that you can patent someone else's genetic information is central to her point. She has no plans to make the collection for commercial purposes, but aims to demonstrate how genetic information could potentially be exploited.
Why McQueen?
As for why she selected McQueen to illustrate her idea, Gorjanc says his fame and fascination with pushing fashion to extremes make him the ideal subject. "One of the reasons I decided to use Alexander McQueen was to show that it doesn't have to be your parent or relative, it can be someone really big and they can't do anything about it because there is nothing to protect them. McQueen isn’t alive any more and he is a huge fashion genius, so you would think he would be more protected."
There is also the issue of obtaining a public figure's DNA. "A more practical reason," says Gorjanc, "is because of his hair labels, which are a rare source of authentic DNA material. If I got Marilyn Monroe hair from eBay there is no guarantee it is Marilyn Monroe's." It's almost as if McQueen himself foresaw the scientific possibilities which could arise from leaving traces of his DNA in his work.
This could be a new ethical way to source leather, Gorjanc claims
Gorjanc argues that 'human leather' could actually be an ethical alternative to animal skins. "A lot of people are really grossed out by the whole procedure," she admits, "but in my opinion it's way less gross than other procedures at a leather farm because it doesn't include animal slaughter and is completely lab born and doesn't hurt any human beings. We are so grossed out by human leather, but then use animal leather in our every day life."
You'll need to put sun cream on your human leather bags
There is one major difference with human leather however; it can get burnt. "If it isn't fully tanned (with a chemical of vegetable treatment) when you expose it to the sun it can get sun burnt because the human skin is more fragile than animal skin because it has less protected layers," the student, who is currently applying for funding, explains.
"You can treat it as normal skin and apply UV protection or moisturiser, and we will try to develop a specific protection. It is really interesting how you can manipulate it in the laboratory, you can add freckles and moles because it is just a matter of condensing the melanin to one point. You can also apply other manipulation, such as tattoos."
Thought-provoking, boundary-breaking and, well, just a little bit gross, Gorjanc's project has all the hallmarks of an experimental McQueen collection.
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