A Living Dress Heals Its Own Tears

Splash some potato water on it. That's how you fix a hole in the new textile coming out of the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, because the fabric is alive, and alive things can grow back.

Researchers have created a textile made from the parasitic fungus Cordyceps militaris, which is biodegradable and can be adapted for different properties by co-culturing with other microbes. The key word is living. Most existing mycelium-based materials use dead fungal matter; this new approach lets the material retain the properties of a living organism.

Researcher Ke Li and her colleagues developed the textile by growing the fungus into tiny spherical pellets in liquid culture. It's made from hyphae, the microscopic thread-like structures that make up fungi, and those structures intertwine to create the material's framework. No conventional fabric, no plastic mesh, no external scaffold needed.

New growth can be triggered by applying a nutrient solution of potato water, causing the dormant mycelium to germinate and send out new filaments to renew the surface. When that solution is applied over a hole along with a small patch of fresh fungus, the living cells grow across the gap, repairing it without adhesives or stitching. The material can also gain added properties, blue pigmentation or UV resistance, by co-culturing it with yeast or other fungi.

There is one fairly significant catch: the material is almost too biodegradable. Soil-burial tests showed it can break down almost completely in around 41 days. That's not a closet problem. That's a composting schedule.

Nobody has worn the prototype dress yet. Nobody has figured out how to make it last longer without killing it. The fabric is alive and the timeline is open.

Read the full story at New Scientist, July 24, 2026

Hot Take: Fungi have been building self-repairing, biodegradable, architecturally self-supporting networks in forest soil since before trees existed. Cordyceps militaris didn't learn any new tricks for the runway; it just finally got a dress fitting.