Most fashionistas like to try to stay ahead of the curve – but a new style involves going quite far in the opposite direction, 66 million years back in time.
For tomorrow, the world’s first ‘T-Rex leather’ handbag, engineered from the prehistoric beast’s DNA, is up for auction.
And it will come with a price fit for the king of the dinosaurs, between £300,000 and £500,000.
The collaboration – between The Organoid Company, Lab-Grown Leather Limited and creative agency VML – led to the leather being developed at a lab in Newcastle.
It builds on previous research that involved extracting a fragment of collagen from a T-Rex fossil found in 1988 in Montana in the US.
It was one of the most complete specimens and was said to contain preserved blood proteins, but this is much debated.
Experts used this fragment to artificially recreate what a full-length T-Rex collagen sequence would have looked like, incorporating it into lab-devised leather cells.
Bas Korsten, from VML, said: ‘With T-Rex leather, we’re harnessing the biology of the past to create the luxury materials of the future.
Scientists have extracted a fragment of collagen from a T-Rex fossil found in 1988 in Montana in the US and used it to synthesis T-rex leather
The T-rex DNA has been spliced with chicken proteins to grow the leather in a lab
‘This lab-grown leather hasn’t yet convinced the luxury world. Why? Because it feels like an imitation. We knew we had to do something radically different.
‘So we went back 66 million years. The result is a material that doesn’t copy the past but reimagines it.’
Researchers based the framework largely on chicken proteins.
However, archaeologist Dr Jan Dekker, from the University of Turin in Italy, said: ‘What they have done is create synthetic collagen using an AI model trained on a variety of species.
‘But it is not a dinosaur, it’s more chicken.’
The one-of-a-kind bag, designed by Polish fashionistas Enfin Leve, will be sold at auction at Hotel Drouot in Paris.
