Bottega Veneta just dropped a collection made entirely from mycelium, the fungi root network grown i

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]Bottega Veneta just dropped a collection made entirely from mycelium. What's mycelium? Well, it's the building blocks of fungi or mushrooms, and it's grown in a lab. They did it with no press campaign, no announcement, and no sustainability marketing. This is the most important biomaterial story in the luxury fashion in years. Here's why.

[00:00:21]Every other luxury brand that has touched mycelium did it loudly. Stella McCartney made a press tour of her Mylo collection. Hermès announced Sylva nia with the collaboration with MycoWorks, which I was a part of. Both projects are now defunct and scaled back. Bottega did the opposite. Three years of quiet R&D with Kering and an Italian biotech company called Mogou, rebranded to Skin.

[00:00:45]They took the mycelium material and asked one question. Can we make it work with their signature woven leather technique that has defined the house for 50 years? The answer was eventually yes.

[00:00:55]Is it durable? Not sure, but they named the line woven mycelium. Put it on the website. They let the craft speak for itself. Here's why this matters for the broader industry. Mycelium did not fail because the material was bad necessarily. It failed because every previous launch had a huge marketing story and not necessarily scale behind it. The brands and the mycelium companies needed the press release, but they weren't quite ready to back that up with production capacity. Bottega is the first luxury house right now to treat mycelium as a real material rather than a sustainability gesture. The collection is for sale right now at standard Bottega pricing. So, good luck affording it. But, this is what mycelium needed all along. Not another announcement, just a craftsman willing to weave it.