Luxury Palace Plants Become a Dazzling Dress

In England, plants from royal estates became the basis for a dress.

London designers created a dress from the leaves of a giant bearberry.

London-based sustainable fashion designers have created a dress from giant bearberry leaves harvested from one of King Charles III's estates. Vin Cara and Omi Ong presented this dress at the Vin + Omi show during London Fashion Week in September 2024.

Long-sleeved maxi dress

It's common at fashion shows for the bride wearing a wedding dress to be the last to exit. However, Vin + Omi's show, which wrapped up its spring 2024 collection during London Fashion Week, featured a long-sleeved maxi dress made from the leaves of giant bearberry grown on King Charles III's Sandringham estate.

"This dress feels wonderful to the touch, like silk," said Wyn Kara, who joined the video call from Spain with Omi Ong, where they were filming a documentary about sustainable innovations around the world. "It's very majestic. "

New materials made from plants

The Giant bearberry fabric is a new continuation of the design duo's collaboration with the royal estates to develop 10 new materials from plants such as nettles and willow shoots.

Sustainable fashion and alternative materials

In recent years, the fashion industry has become increasingly interested in alternative sources of material production, such as using mushrooms or pineapple leaves to produce faux leather.

"It's developing so quickly," said Claire Lerpiniere, associate professor of sustainable textile materials at the De Montfort University School of Fashion and Textiles in Leicester, England. "It's already become a real business. "

The giant bearberry experiment

Although neither man had formal training in fashion - Mr.

While visiting Sandringham in February, they noticed that a giant bearberry tree covered about a quarter of the lake in front of the house and needed trimming. This perennial plant, whose botanical name is Petasites japonicus, comes from Asia, can grow up to five feet tall and has kidney-shaped leaves that are up to four feet in diameter.

"It was perfect," Mr. Kara said, "to experiment with it," because the plants needed pruning and because the designers only work with waste.

They collected several hundred leaves, totaling about six kilograms (13.2 pounds), and then used a retting process to extract the long fibers, exposing the leaves outside in the morning so that they would get wet from dew and the unwanted parts would rot. The long fibrous fibers were then bound together using a plant binder to form a yarn, which the six collaborators developed on hand looms to produce four meters of fabric 1.37 meters wide. The work took about four months.

"It was a classic fabric," Mr. Cara said, "it creates a classic dress." The fabric had a natural golden hue because no chemicals were used to process it, and the dress was made using only six seams to limit the amount of energy used to assemble it.

Sustainability

Nina Marenzi, founder of Future Fabrics Expo, an annual event in London that showcases sustainable material solutions, said that innovations such as cottonwood fabric are "a great way of communicating what is possible" and it is important to "change the collective consciousness and allow everyone to not only realize what is possible, but to dream a little bigger".