Neri Oxman experiments with fabric pigment created by bacteria

Designer Neri Oxman has created a fabric dyeing concept where a bacterial solution is sprayed onto a 3D-knitted silk textile and left to grow a living culture producing faded indigo and pink pigments.

The project, called Vigils, was developed by the designer’s studio, Oxman, for designers, artists and collaborators to “create new forms of material and aesthetic expression”.

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Tussah silk thread within the fabric is coated with “bacterially sensitive chemicals”, which act as “a bioreactor” once mixed with the spray.

The fabric then sits for 24 hours, during which the solution and chemicals begin to interact and eventually produce a living bacterial culture. This organism, “numbering in the billions of cells”, spreads across the fabric, leaving amino acids in its wake, which colour the textile.

For the process, the Oxman lab created a spray solution containing the BL21 strain of Escherichia coli (E. coli), a strain commonly used in biotechnology and synthetic biology research, and sprayed it onto a silk fabric.

Its growth pattern is directed by “where and how densely the designer directed the culture to grow” via the spray, according to the team.

The fabric is then washed and dried, removing the bacteria, but the pigment remains.

“The microorganisms respond to signals associated with the textile substrate, making biological activity an active component of the material process,” said the team. “Vigils is a research-driven exploration of biological textile colouration.”

“The project is intended to investigate the interaction between synthetic biology and material systems rather than to represent a fully optimised industrial dyeing process.”

The studio created a series of four capes to demonstrate the technique. They display the variations in the muted colours and patterns created by the bacteria.

The studio is presenting the process as a possible alternative to “resource-intensive” industrial dyeing processes.

“The result is not simply an alternative way of applying color: the biological process becomes part of the design itself, producing patterns and variations that could not be achieved through conventional dyeing and making each textile an expression of the process that created it,” said Oxman.

It has not undergone extensive Life Cycle Assessment, which measures its environmental outputs, and is still in the prototype stage.

Neri Oxman opened a New York studio in Midtown Manhattan in 2024 and unveiled an AI-designed skyscraper to demonstrate its computational abilities at the time.

The designer is known for her work in material ecology, but she also faced allegations of plagiarism in her PhD thesis completed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.