ADIDAS debuted its first shoes made with Mylo’s “Unleather,” a material crafted from the root structure of mushrooms.

The Stan Smith Mylo is a concept sneaker that uses the renewable material for its outer upper, stripes, heel tab overlay and branding. It’s part of the company’s push to only use natural materials in their shoes, like the natural rubber midsole, to reduce Adidas’ environmental impact. Only a concept, the company expects to launch a “commercially available proof of concept” in the near future.

Stan Smith is Adidas’ signature tennis shoe, and has previously been released in a vegan version, albeit as a limited edition. The sneaker has secured its place in fashion history with its unique spin on Adidas’ signature design. This version retains the white upper, albeit with a cream, rather than green heel pad, with the sole colored in the light brown we associate with “natural” rubber color.

In recent years, Adidas has been working to address its environmental impact, including working with ocean-cleanup body Parley to create clothes and footwear that use disused plastic. Since then, the company launched the fully-recyclable Futurecraft Loop sneaker in 2019, and in May 2020, the company teamed up with Allbirds to reduce carbon emissions, pledging to only use recycled plastics by 2024.

Adidas’ work was not achieved at the German company’s headquarters. Instead it enlisted the aid of startup Bolt Threads, one of a handful of companies that is developing alternative materials which could be used to supplant silk and leather. Bolt Threads’ Mylo-branded “Unleather” has repeatedly been described as looking and feeling just like leather, but requiring far fewer raw materials and energy to produce.

Mylo is grown at a vertical farming facility in the Netherlands, where mushrooms are grown in a manner similar to how they would develop on the forest floor. These large trays contain a growing surface — in this case, sawdust and “organic material” — which then grows mycelium into a “foamy layer” like a “big bag of smashed marshmallows.” This foam is then harvested after just two weeks, where it is then processed using a secret method the company claims uses “green chemistry principles.” It is then tanned and dyed to make a product that looks and feels like real leather, ready to be shipped to fashion houses. The leftover waste is then composted, further burnishing the claim that Mylo is better for the environment.

Bolt Threads was founded in 2009, and in 2017 introduced its first commercial project to create artificial silk fibers. In 2018, it debuted Mylo with a Kickstarter campaign to sell a bag made with the material in partnership with Portland bagmaker Chester Wallace. Deliveries of the bag were due to begin at the end of 2020, but the company said that the first production run “did not meet our standard of quality to ship.”

Jamie Bainbridge, Bolt’s vice president of product development, said that one of Mylo’s strengths is the ability to screen out variation, ensuring greater uniformity than with a natural product like cowhide leather.

Bolt Threads said that it has “explored about 4,000 iterations of Mylo over the past few years to get the soft, supple and even material that is here today.”

(SD-Agencies)