Vogue

Introducing Bucket Hats Made Out of Mycelium

The future has arrived: we have mushroom leather hats now. Slowly but surely, leather alternatives made from mycelium—essentially the root structure of a mushroom—instead of animal hides have entered the market. Today, MycoWorks and milliner Nick Fouquet have unveiled a capsule collection of hats: the first commercially available Reishi products. 

It’s an optimistic milestone for leather alternatives, and the people who want to shop consciously but don’t want to forgo their favorite boots. Reishi is animal-free, plastic-free, and vegetable tanned. The result is a leather alternative that is on its own biodegradable (although finishings and flourishes that a designer adds may change that), and beautiful. In my personal experience, it looks real. 

“It’s indistinguishable,” Fouquet says of the product. He adds that his seamstresses couldn’t tell that they were using a different material other than leather. The biggest similarity to Fouquet is how workable the material is.  

Read the full story by Sarah Spellings on Vogue.