Fermented Clothing?!?

The geek in me is grinning from ear to ear after reading this:

Bugs Make Dress Smell Like Old Wine

Here's a brief excerpt:

Australian researchers have combined art and science to make dresses from fermented fabric, using bacteria to 'grow' slimy dresses from wine and beer.

"We're looking at [the dresses] to provoke some discussion about future fashions, about the possibility of other material we can use instead of our normal cottons and silks," says Gary Cass, who works on the Micro'be' project at the University of Western Australia.

Cass is a laboratory technician at the university who, among other things, writes science fiction.

He says he was inspired to grow the dresses when he was working in a vineyard many years ago.

He noticed that when oxygen got into the vats and turned the wine into vinegar, a slimy, rubbery layer grew on top.

This layer was cellulose, produced by acetobacter bacteria as a waste product when they convert wine into vinegar.

To ferment fabrics, Cass and his colleagues deliberately let vats of wine go off to produce cellulose.

And to get the shape of a dress, they lifted the layers of slimy cellulose off and laid them over a deflatable doll.

After each dress was complete, they deflated the doll and removed it, leaving the dress intact.

"It's the bacteria that are weaving all these fibres together," says Cass. "We're not using any machines, sewing machines and so forth."

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Just think, if they can figure out how to polymerize the fibers to increase their strength and rigidity they could theoretically create a bottle made of cellulose and package the beer inside of itself. Plus, since it would be made from cellulose (aka plant fiber) it would be biodegradable. How cool is that?