About

East London creative studio Here has connected leading figures from the worlds of fashion, architecture and beauty with some of the brightest minds at Central Saint Martin’s for this ground-breaking exhibition. These world-changing ideas will be showcased at The Academy Rooms in Mayfair, taking visitors on a journey of new thinking and pioneering experimentation across different material possibilities.

 Fashion designer Rejina Pyo is collaborating with colour creationist and CSM student Jesse Adler to show how colour cultivated from fungi, such as mushrooms, lichen and mould, can be a safer and healthier alternative to synthetic colourants, and more scalable and economically viable than natural dyes for the runways of the future.

Thames Water and Bureau De Change is collaborating with sustainable glass specialist and CSM student Lulu Harrison to explore how quagga mussels, an invasive non-native species in the UK that cause blockages in Thames Water’s transfer tunnels, can be turned into a sustainable eco-glass formed from the shells of this natural but nuisance by-product from the Thames.

While pioneering beauty brand Haeckels is collaborating with bio-scent experimenter and CSM student Tetsuo Lin to bring back a range of scents from flora which have been lost to extinction – developing the scent by synthetically producing it from DNA. By engineering scents in this way, unnecessary waste in the beauty industry can be addressed.

This incredible collection of collaborators all share Here’s dedication to ‘Beautility’ – an ambition to create beautiful and useful things. Their experiments will push us closer towards new innovation in the biosphere that will light a path to a more sustainable future, and take visitors to this unique exhibition on a journey to consider, and more deeply understand, new possibilities and new futures for familiar, everyday materials.