What if you could wear the skin of your favorite
celebrity? Fashion designer Tina Gorjanc has
a scheme to do just that -- and it leans more
on synthetic biology
than basement pits and lotion baskets.
Gorjanc's project at London's Central Saint
Martins fashion school revolves around the
creation of a very special sort of leather.
Instead of harvesting it from a cow or other
nonhuman animal, she plans to grow the skin
of deceased fashion designer Alexander McQueen
and make it into handbags and jackets -- flesh-colored
items that will even feature McQueen's distinguishing
marks and tattoos. The starting point for
this grisly/glam fashion venture is a sample
of McQueen's own hair used in his 1992 silk
coat titled "Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims."
See, he probably would have dug this project.
The DNA will be manipulated and grown out
into skin, tanned and finally processed into
human leather. The technology here emerges
from the realm of synthetic biology, an exciting
area of biotechnology that has already led
to the creation of lab-grown skin grafts and
synthetic organs. The ultimate possibilities
are transhumanist in nature, entailing everything
from engineered disease immunity to enhanced
longevity. But cutting edge science sometimes
outpaces our ability to understand all the
ramifications, and that's where art enters
the picture. Gorjanc hopes to push the notion
of sustainable, slaughter-free lab-grown leather
-- but the project is also about the lack
of rights concerning our own genetic information.
See, the project here is unapproved by McQueen's
family and fashion brand. She snagged the
DNA from a hair sample and has already filed
a patent for the resulting leather material
based on its singular source and creation
process. As bioethicist Glenn Cohen pointed
out on the website Quartz, the UK and United
States afford little or no ownership protection
to abandoned tissues. A wizard can come along,
stuff a voodoo doll full of your hair clippings,
and there's nothing you can do about it -- the
same potentially goes for real-world cloning
and synthetic tissue growth. We're drifting
into largely uncharted legal waters here,
at least as far as luxury items made from
dead celebrities go.
So while the fun question here is "Which Oscar
winner would you wear as a pair of slacks?,"
the more pressing issue is "Who owns your
genetic information and how much privacy can
you expect concerning all the scraps of discarded
hair and skin you leave in your wake each
day?" Let us know what you think, and if you
crave even more weird science wonders, be
sure to check out NOW.howstuffworks.com each
and every day.
