Meet the designer using mycelium in fashion and interior design to help us understand that death is a part of life
Maurizio Montalti is the cofounder of SQIM, a company on a mission to harness the power of mushrooms, collaborating with nature to design a fungal future
At Parley, we’re always thinking about the future. What can the world look like? How can it be improved? How can we not just live in harmony with nature, but learn from it? We are aware that we cannot simply recycle our way out of the plastic crisis – we need to redesign the structures and systems that pollute our planet, along with the harmful materials that we’ve become addicted to. It’s why we’re calling for a Material Revolution – we have to change the way we make things in order to create the future. This new Parley series will meet the innovators and scientists who are trying to remodel our material world.
Nobody really knows how many species of fungi there are in the world. Scientists have formally identified 155,000 species, but there are millions yet to be discovered and understood, growing quietly among us, a vital cog in the planet’s ecosystem. Many fungi are crucial in the process of death, important decomposers in ecosystems that help to break down plant or animal debris, cycling nutrients back through the environment.
It is this relationship with death that fascinates Maurizio Montalti, the founder of SQIM, a company exploring how mycelium – fungus’ root-like structure through which it absorbs nutrients – can be used for design, a relationship that he’s keen to stress must be symbiotic and collaborative rather than extractive. Montalti is fascinated by the fearful approach to death that we have in the West, seeing it as something that should be “explored, understood, and accepted as a fundamental, beautiful, complementary part to life”.
SQIM was founded in 2015, at first a series of mycelium-based experiments geared towards making products, but without a specific outcome in mind. Nearly ten years later, and SQIM has received investment from Kering Group, one of fashion’s largest conglomerates, and has two key strands of its business – Mogu, which creates acoustic panels and flooring made entirely of fungal mycelium and ephea™️, a leather-like material that can be used in fashion and has already been adapted by Balenciaga for a coat in its AW22 collection.
We caught up with Montalti to talk about his vision for a world designed with biology, entering the world of luxury fashion and his time as the lead singer of an eco-punk band.
Petri dish with living fungal culture
“I believe in the vision of a world designed with biology, where the objects populating our everyday life, from buildings and furniture, to clothing, computers, appliances, etc. will be biofabricated.”
Maurizio Montalti — Cofounder of SQIM
Q&A
You say that “nature is the best architect of all”, which is something that we discuss at Parley a lot. Can you expand on that, particularly in relation to how nature informs your work?
At SQIM, we develop technologies rooted in an active cooperation with non-human forms of life –organisms, microbes, and more specifically fungi, in order to derive opportunities that emerge from such collaborative endeavors, such as innovatively responsible materials and products. I deliberately talk about cooperation and not exploitation; whether it’s interior design, architecture-related products, or fashion, nature is the source, an actor with whom we decided to engage, striving to establish what must become an effectively symbiotic relationship.
I look at it in the most mutualistic sense, where both parties derive benefits from the relationship. As part of our work, we listen to and observe the behavior of the microbes, to decipher their living dynamics. I don’t think we are inventing something entirely new – we actually look at everything that is already out there, adding our creativity and ingenuity, while putting ourselves on the same line with other living entities. What we do with our work is bridge that nonsensical gap that has been established between the notions of nature and culture as if they’d be two completely separated domains. Accordingly, we source the best opportunities that emerge from an active cooperation with nature, for delivering performance-driven and high-quality products that are the result of regenerative biological processes.
Mycelium growth process
What are some of your favorite designs that nature has produced?
On a personal level, I get happily lost in the wonder that is elicited by going through forests. You can observe the most evident organisms and plants, that humans have been fascinated by for a long time, and witness the many strategies that they have been developing throughout their evolution. Yet, what I find particularly seductive is the realm of the unseen, things that are invisible to our naked eye. This is an area of great fascination to me, particularly when it comes to the kingdom of fungi and the active processes of transformation that they perform, allowing nutrients to cycle throughout the ecosystem. They mostly go unnoticed, simply because mostly we are not capable of witnessing their presence, either because of our limited senses, or due to the time that certain processes take.
Fungi play a key role as decomposing and connecting agents within the natural ecosystem – I love the interconnectedness, the mingling between living systems. This is what stimulates nature as a fundamentally interdependent domain where each actor plays its role in keeping the system in a constantly self-balancing state. I think this is one of the most interesting features of nature.
What do you love about working with mycelium?
I started working with mycelium in 2009, prior to the foundation of the company, which kicked off thanks to the preliminary work that I had been conducting through my design-research practice. Yet for me, it all started from an investigation rooted in an interest in understanding more about processes of decomposition and degradation of organic matters, as in relation to the fundamental notion of death. The investigation didn’t start at first with the intention of creating new materials, but from an interest in questioning and understanding more about our Western way of looking at death. Typically it’s something that we are afraid of, something that exclusively elicits disturbing feelings, as opposed to the need of understanding the key complementarity that death has in regard to life, almost a banal concept, yet a sensitivity perhaps more pervasive in Eastern cultures. That’s where fungi entered the picture, due to their capacity of acting as regenerative agents by means of processes rooted in decomposition and cyclical transformation, while also functioning as information highways connecting the many living agents, particularly in the soil ecosystem. I often describe my learning journey as a downward enlarging spiral where the more you dive into the fungal kingdom, the more this spiral widens, and with it the opportunities you are able to witness, feeding both your individual growth as well as your biotechnological developments.
I’m really interested in mycelium and why it’s good for sound absorption. Can you explain that?
When growing fungi on agro-industrial residues it is possible to guide the mycelium growth to derive specific properties in the resulting material. These can include techno-mechanical as well as aesthetic or tactile features, as influenced by both the biofabrication process and by subsequent post-processing steps. By varying the environmental conditions along incubation as well as the overall growing time, it is therefore possible to inform the specific characteristics of the mycelium, including its overall distribution, to obtain low-density bio-composite materials, formed by a combination of mycelium biomass and residual plant matter. Thanks to the porosity and lightness of fungal mycelium and to the organization of the residual fibers, we therefore obtain standardized, biofabricated materials, characterized by suitable performances in terms of acoustic absorption, that do not contain any glue or synthetic polymer, as the binding agent responsible for assembling the loose fibers in a fully formed and structured product is in fact the mycelium itself.
We founded the company in 2015 with the objective of standardizing and scaling up fermentation-based processes geared towards the creation of ecologically-resonant materials, though initially we didn’t know which products we would develop, as the identification of a feasible business case was in fact also part of our early research. There’s so much that one can do when working with mycelium and finding a focus is key. It’s also important to note that there’s still much to learn about the incredible kingdom of fungi; for instance, it is estimated that more than five million fungal species exist, of which only a tiny percentage has been studied, and every species includes countless strains, each a unique organism with different behaviors and holding different skills and opportunities. Such uniqueness means that working with any strain, for instance one sourced from the wild, requires an accurate study to understand how to employ it best, starting from the coupling with a nutritive substrate, until defining the multiple environmental parameters that influence the growth process. Our myco-bank today includes more than 350 collected and studied strains, yet along production we employ a few selected ones, depending on the product. One strain was particularly important for us in the early stages of our venture, as we started coupling it with residues from the textile manufacturing industry, namely unusable raw cotton fiber. After validating the overall consistency along production and measuring the resulting material’s properties, we decided to target the interior architecture market, as the mycelium biocomposites expressed a very positive acoustic performance, showing efficiency in absorbing the frequencies of speech in interior environments, hence providing interior comfort. Only at that point and after a careful and patient journey could we finally establish our focus and first business case, within a market – the acoustic panels market – which is largely dominated by articles made of synthetic polymers.
Balenciaga Maxi Hooded Wrap Coat (Winter '22) made with ephea™️
ephea™️ was used by Balenciaga to make an incredible looking hooded wrap coat. What was the experience of collaborating with such a major luxury fashion house like and do you have any more fashion projects with ephea in the works?
Our collaboration with Balenciaga has been an absolutely thrilling experience, not only due to the privilege of working with such an illustrious fashion house, but also considering that our launch with Balenciaga coincided with the unraveling of ephea to the global community too, as an entirely new class of high-quality materials dedicated to fashion-related applications. We really appreciated the openness of Balenciaga’s team in embracing our innovative solutions, while sharing expertise and jointly working through an extensive and fruitful feedback-loop process with a mutually honest and transparent approach.
From the very beginning we shared a desire to go beyond the too-frequently-seen sensational announcements, driven by the common purpose of delivering a truly concrete and positive impact in fashion through effective market-launches. That’s what we did at the end of 2022 through the commercial release in stores of Balenciaga’s Maxi Hooded Wrap Coat, realized with ephea™️. The experience also allowed us to expand our knowledge to better understand and properly navigate the dynamics typical of the fashion industry and to consequently fine tune our business operations accordingly. Since then, we have engaged with and keep working with many other fashion houses and brands, who trust our products thanks to their duly quantified credentials in regard to performance and beneficial impacts, and an appreciation for our transparent, collaborative and proactive attitude. In short, it’s an exciting journey, requiring ambition, patience, ingenuity, and determination, and we definitely look forward to unraveling the results of all ongoing developments through upcoming launches, so stay tuned!
How soon do you think it might be before we see mycelium used in the fashion industry at scale?
As previously mentioned, scaling mycelium innovation requires time. From a technological point of view, everything needs to be conceived from scratch due to the lack of prior art, and this requires accurate studies, the involvement of many different professional expertise, and a thorough multi-disciplinary approach. Collaborating with microbial systems and working with unexplored biological processes introduces evermore complexities that must be dealt with, so to gather a complete understanding of the process parameters animating the growth/fermentation phase, or to fine-tune any post-processing step. On our end, we feel that we went through a very quick progression in just a few years, and we’re currently scaling our operations further, yet at least five more years might be needed to reach the required capacity for full commercial scale. At the same time, multiple other factors could contribute to fuel further trust in the field and effectively penetrate the market, by fast-forwarding the adoption of next-gen mycelium materials dedicated to fashion, as for instance due to the currently emerging regulatory frameworks, particularly at EU level, which will push brands to prioritize on innovative solutions that deliver quality and overall functionality, while strongly mitigating environmental impacts.
This, together with an increasingly higher level of maturity of the technologies and products, will most likely contribute to creating conditions for brands to embrace longer term perspectives through the establishment of related development plans and business models, as strongly focused on responsible innovation and on the benefits they could enable for planet and people, rather than just profit.
“What we do with our work is bridging the nonsensical gap that has been established between the notions of nature and culture as if they’d be two completely separate domains.”
Maurizio Montalti — Cofounder of SQIM
Retail store using Mogu Mycelium Resilient Floors
You talked earlier about your love of forests – walking around them and absorbing the atmosphere. When did your own personal ‘climate journey’ begin?
I’d say that it began when I was a young kid growing up in Emilia-Romagna. I was always very curious and loved spending time in the countryside, observing the behavior of small organisms. Later in my teens I was the lead singer in a punk rock band called the “Ecolabel”, and not only the band’s name but also some of my lyrics referenced my curiosity for ecology and the rich interconnectedness of living systems. Unfortunately you cannot listen to it online anymore – we had a Myspace page back then, but I don’t think it still exists. I studied a five year MA in Industrial Engineering and Management; in hindsight, I wasn’t deeply interested in engineering at that time but it was certainly a very useful journey, from which I graduated with something very unusual for that time, a thesis on eco-design and material recycling. Essentially, it was an analysis and an overall argumentation about the lifecycle of consumer products, the materials that they embed, and their negative impacts on the ecosystem, looking at case studies and the possibility of fostering a culture rooted in recycling. This was 2006 – unfortunately not many people talked about “sustainability” back then. After that I enrolled in another MA, studying Conceptual Design in the Netherlands, and a good part of my design-driven investigations focused on the role and functioning of other-than-human organisms in the ecosystem. I decided to graduate with two projects focusing on decomposition and on “designing away” existing products, rather than creating new items for consumption, by relying on the capacity of selected fungal species to degrade, detoxify and recycle harmful materials. For some, at that time, my projects appeared to have little to do with design, yet it was exactly such cross-disciplinary, systemic approach that contributed to further feed my fascination for the living dynamics animating microbial life, allowing me to learn further and creating the basis for a design practice devoted to researching opportunities for the creation of innovative, biofabricated materials and products. Looking back I realize that, whether consciously or not, the drive for contributing to investigating and fostering environmental responsibility and ecological resonance has always been part of me, and it’s of course still there, guiding me through such an exciting, ongoing journey.
You talk about your mission as being to bridge the gap between humans and nature – is that something that you perceive as being far too distant at the moment, that gap between humans and nature?
Culturally speaking I think we are still quite far, as in fact we live in a time of separation, from fellow humans as well as from nature, and from the many agents participating in nature’s dynamic dance. That’s why it’s important to progress in bridging such nonsensical gaps between the notions of culture and nature and understand our agency and overall responsibility as part of a much wider system, as our ancestors wisely understood before us.
These days much is being discussed about regeneration; that’s certainly a very good thing and good progress is being made by committed individuals and organizations. Yet, to truly understand what regeneration implies, we humans must first learn about how to be inclusive and understand about the relational and transitional qualities of what we call nature. Nature is constantly morphing, through the actions of multiple forces, of which human culture is just one. Nature is our home, our origin, and our habitat, as well as the one of many others, evolving through active processes of entanglement that we call symbiosis. All in all, we are dependent on the lives of others, whether animals, plants, microorganisms, or any other kind of living species, and we are also custodians of all such beings. That’s why mitigating harm, as mostly seen today, is certainly not sufficient. Rather, it is about moving away from practices rooted in exploitation, by developing new ways that could promote the advent of productive approaches devoted to restoring, enriching, nurturing, replenishing, and creating the conditions where ecosystems, economies, and any living agent, including us, could flourish and thrive.
I would say that to move forward we need to be radical, and to do so we should start thinking and acting as a fungus would do - with nature, for nature, and as nature.
Maurizio Montalti (left), with industrial designer Serena Camere and cofounder Stefano Babbini
I agree that we need to be radical. Are you confident in the future of biofabrication and how it can shape our world?
I believe biology to be the ultimate form of technology, and fully trust that biofabrication-driven practices and their related products will gradually take over, rendering traditional industrial approaches increasingly obsolete. Despite the urgency, it’s a relatively young field of innovation and at this moment, despite the great efforts, we’re just scratching the tip of a much larger iceberg. Some time is still needed to expand knowledge, reach full maturity, and compete at scale. Yet, when working on bringing about such innovative approaches, as for any technology or tool, it’s also fundamental to strive and anticipate as thoroughly as possible about any potentially harmful implication that could emerge, preventing unwanted damage.
Being radical also means being connected to our origin. That’s why I believe in the vision of a world designed with biology, where the objects populating our everyday life, from buildings and furniture, to clothing, computers and appliances, will be biofabricated. Among multiple other benefits, biofabrication could also offer the ultimate opportunity to engineer “end of life” into products, similarly to the way in which any living organism has a certain lifespan.
Nowadays we still seem to be obsessed with the idea of eternity, attempting to preserve the products of our civilization forever, or even worse being seduced by the possibility of living an eternal life on earth. Personally, I can’t think of anything more dreadful than that, as I think that death should be explored, understood, and accepted as a fundamental, beautiful, complementary part to life – without death no regeneration could ever take place. Until we’re able to recognize ourselves as a thoroughly interconnected agent within a multitude of agents, within the complexity of an ecosystem, we’ll definitely have some difficulty in realizing the ultimate biofabrication paradigm, which must be rooted in the living, not just exclusively for ourselves, but for the benefit of any living creature contributing to support the life of the planet, and ours too.
Imagery courtesy of Mogu, ephea™️ and Balenciaga
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