- The world’s first leather T-Rex is unveiled today (April 2) in Amsterdam in bag form.
- The project is a collaboration between creative agency VML, The Organoid Company and Lab-Grown Leather Ltd.
- It follows last year’s announcement, which has generated intense debate.
He Jurassic Park Movies are one step closer to becoming a reality, all thanks to lab-grown T-Rex leather from creative agency VML.
One year since its announcement, VML, The Organoid Company and Lab-Grown Leather Ltd have been working together to collaborate on an ambitious project that sees the world’s first production of dinosaur leather. The partnership aims to show the potential of the material and how it can contribute to sustainable fashion.
T-Rex’s first leather product will come in the form of a luxury bag designed by techwear brand Enfin Levé, and will be on display at the Art Zoo Museum in Amsterdam today (April 2). It will also be displayed beneath a monstrous replica of a T-Rex skeleton acquired by the Naturalis Biodiversity Center museum to “symbolize a bridge between ancient biology and luxury design for the future,” as VML states in its announcement.
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After the six-week exhibition, the bag will go up for auction and be sold to the highest bidder, but while VML has shared that it is a collector’s item, the company added that T-Rex leather will continue to be produced and will be commercially available to designers and brands.
CEO of The Organoid Company, Thomas Mitchell, is just one of the brains behind the world’s first dinosaur leather goods and shares: “This project demonstrates how genetic and protein engineering can create entirely new classes of biomaterials.” At the same time, VML’s Global Creative Director, Innovation and CCO EMEA also said the following:
“The harsh reality is that lab-grown leather has not yet convinced the luxury world. Why? Because it looks like an imitation. We knew we had to do something radically different. Not a substitute, but something completely new.”
It is one of the most extravagant technological projects in recent years and it has us scratching our heads. What exactly is T-Rex leather and what do experts say?
Caught on a technicality
The concept of this lab-grown T-Rex leather has been the subject of much debate and controversy since its introduction last year. Basically, it is produced by obtaining fossilized collagen sequences from T-Rex and using processes such as computational biology and artificial intelligence modeling.
According to VML, this allows scientists to “predict(ed) and reconstruct(ed) the remaining genetic information needed to form a complete collagen model,” and from there, the DNA is placed into a carrier cell line, which is then cultured using Lab-Grown Leather Ltd’s advanced tissue engineering platform.
To reduce deforestation and industrial pollution, it is quite revolutionary, but the debate over whether or not it can be classified as leather is still intense. That’s because the base of leather is skin, and researchers have only found T-Rex collagen in bones, as Live Science reported at the time of last year’s announcement. The publication also noted that academics in the field called the lab-grown T-Rex leather manufacturing process “misleading” and “fantastic.”
We’ve reached out to VML for comment on the reaction, so we’ll update this story when we know more.
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