The two chapters “Mauve Mania” and “Dyeing the Cloth” discuss how textile industries have long used natural materials to dye cloth before new innovations and industrialization presented a wide range of cost-effective and colorfast options. With a rising international synthetic dye market, style industries began struggling with the new surplus of colors. Textile designers had to keep up with quickly changing mass market fashion trends, in which artistic originality was replaced by the ability to develop exciting and innovative uses for popular colors. In a TED Talk from 2017, the founder of Faber Futures, Natsai Audrey Chieza, presents an approach aimed at integrating the worlds of design and synthetic biology. Using synthetic biology to redefine our material future, her project aspires to dramatically reduce pollution in the fashion industry by replacing unsustainable industrial processes with natural alternatives. She is currently focused on introducing the world of fashion and technology to the bacteria Streptomyces coelicolor: soil-dwelling organisms that, in interaction with protein fibers, produce a pigment which ranges in colors from blue to pink to purple. This pigment creates colorfast textile dyes without the use of chemicals and with less water usage than traditional processes. She is painting a future, in which the fashion industry could become a leader in sustainability.

Chieza, Natsai Audrey, TED Talk

1. Most of the ecological harm, caused by textile processing, occurs at the finishing and the dyeing stage. … (05:30 – 06:06)
2. And you can see, how this process generates very little runoff and produces a colorfast pigment without the use of any chemicals. (06:55 – 07:32)
3. If we can do this, then we can move what happens on a petri dish so that it can meet the human scale, and then hopefully the architecture of our environments. (08:46 – 08:59)
4. I am working to see how their platform for scaling biology interfaces with my artisanal methods of designing with bacteria for textiles. (09:51 – 10:22)
5. Here is the exciting thing: I am not alone, there are others who are building capacity in this field. … (10:44 – 11:26)

Blasczyk, Lee, “Mauve Mania” In The Color Revolution

1. The manner in which colorists and chemists approached the dye research was guided by the market. … (p.27)
2. Most important, the focus of research shifted from industrial engineering and the improvement of processed and products to the discovery of new colors. (p. 29)
3. Every generation discovers new needs and re-invents practices for current circumstances … . (p. 31)

Waldbauer, Gilbert, “Dyeing the Cloth” In Fireflies, Honey, and Silk

1. … the value of cochineal produced during those centuries exceeded that all of the gold and silver that the Spanish stole from the native inhabitants of the New World. (p. 53)
2. … the cochineal dyes are – unlike synthetic dyes – virtually permanent, because they resist fading from light and washing. (p. 61)
3. Following the invention of the first synthetic dye in 1856 – soon followed by the synthesis of many others – the international market for cochineal and other natural dyes rapidly collapsed. (p.63)