a civilised panic about the future
DISCLAIMER: It’s said Lewis Carroll was tripping when he wrote Alice in Wonderland. Fashion in Wonderland is my sober, legally compliant attempt to prove that you don’t need hallucinogens to write the utterly bizarre.
The world I knew has gone for a toss. AI, gene editing, robots, drones, driverless cars – we are effectively living at the entrance to the future. Imagine humanity has just got on the yellow brick road and is marching towards Emerald City. This brings to mind Taupin’s lyric about bidding goodbye to the yellow brick road and “going back to my plough,” sung by Elton John – a line drenched in nostalgia. But unlike Taupin, we no longer have the luxury of bidding farewell. Humanity has traded the round-trip ticket for a one-way ride into patentable absurdity.
And of all the things I could panic about – climate collapse, rogue AI, lab-grown political parties – I’ve decided to focus on fashion. This likely confirms, to my readers, that while the world burns, I’ll be found fussing over pleats and patents or pondering whether bioluminescent eveningwear is back- and if so, where are its core patents?
In this article, we won’t just talk about any fashion, but bioengineered, mood-swinging garments that may outlive, out-think, or out-snitch us. Garments that might be co-defendants in future lawsuits or worse, demand royalties.
This piece is a lovingly and cynically embroidered legal hallucination- stitched together with wild conjecture, reluctant logic, existential dread, and a flair for drama.
The State of the Art and Law:
We’ve seen mycelium leather like Fleather by Phool, spider silk proteins from Kraig Biocraft Laboratories, and MIT’s bioLogic project with garments that react to sweat.
We now have “functional textiles” – fabrics adapting to body, climate, and maybe one day, emotion. What happens when we try to drape centuries-old IP frameworks over shapeshifting second skin?
Suppose a designer instructs an AI to generate genetic sequences for a self-cleaning fabric. The AI outputs a blueprint. A lab synthesises it. The result? A photosynthetic dress that converts sunlight into smugness.
So, who owns what? The designer? The algorithm? The scientist?
So far, across the world, DABUS as well as Thaler have lost the battle to “composite ownership” and/or “composite inventorship” – where a non-human bits and chips, aka computer, is listed as co-owner or co-inventor. As of now, the two humans who tried have taken the beating, but the humans would demand that the systems and products to which they “lend” their inventive capabilities and processes – should be given ownership and inventorship rights so that they and their estate continue to own the patents well into the future – long after they have ceased to be [just like John Keats continued to earn royalties for his poem titled so]. So far, these privileges are accorded to copyright owners.
Traditionally, counterfeiting meant knockoffs. In living fashion, infringement could be reverse-engineering a patented E. coli strain to create jackets that glow to music, smell like Moschino’s retired perfume, and hum Uyire. Is it piracy? Biopiracy? Unauthorised bio-theatre?
See the OG biopiracy lawsuit, Monsanto Co. v. Bowman, 569 U.S. 278 (2013) – planting patented seeds counted as unauthorised reproduction. Now, imagine that doctrine applied to a coat regenerating via spores.
The Fashion in Wonderland:
If you’re wondering whether this is real science or a discarded draft of some science fiction Netflix series, here’s a diagram from a research paper titled “Fungal Engineered Living Materials” by scientists at Newcastle and Northumbria.
Vogue in 2022 featured an article titled “Meet the Creative Who Helped Grow Living Plants on Clothes for Loewe,” with models wearing clothes with trees growing on them. Vogue, again in 2022, featured another article titled: “Living, breathing, wearable plants?”- a piece on Biocouture – Bacterial garments.
Now with my “biotechnologist hat” on- if a garment self-repairs, it needs to be fed. That means metabolism, sweat, skin cells, and carbon pollution. Your shirt is a climate activist. It devours smog and emits faint musk.
Conductive threads, edge-AI, mood-reactive design- imagine garments reacting to tone, tears, UV levels. Shy? Your scarf cocoons. Angry? Your trench flares like Goku.
We’re still far from sentient coats- but I don’t rule out a Dr. Strange robe in 20 years.
We’re not far from a world where jackets shed skin and handbags need feeding. Garments that breathe, decay, and might even gossip via pheromonal signaling – which is very much possible by layering a pheromone that reacts to your bodily function or secreted fluid and then the reaction is “caught red handed” in action via some electric signalling captured via some conductive threads whose change in electric potential combined with AI-enabled mood detections – releases a switch that turns on an actuator to spray a perfume.
I am already writing a claim: “A method of emotion-responsive olfactory expression via wearable textile-integrated biosignal processing units.”
The Undoing of the Legal Framework:
The law always plays catch-up. It waits for society to adapt, moral standards to crystallise, then lumbers in with regulation.
The current legal system hasn’t even resolved today’s fashion law dilemmas. When the above fantasies come to life, we’ll be legally underdressed. The law is still figuring out whether AIs should be given inventorship credits; whereas we must ask the legislators to set the standards of AI with whom the inventorship credits may be shared; and ownership rights be added to. However, so far, that question has been swept under the rug; but the human creativity, like stupidity, is boundless; while stupidity is contained by its own accord, the creativity has to be stewarded, codified and recognized for it to thrive, and the law must embody the living garments that are coming in future and have some answers ready.
References
Bowman v. Monsanto Co., 569 U.S. 278 (2013).
MIT Media Lab. (2015). bioLogic: Transforming Materials with Bacteria. Retrieved from https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/biologic/overview/
Phool.co. (n.d.). Fleather. Retrieved from https://www.phool.co/
Kraig Biocraft Laboratories. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.kraiglabs.com/
Jones, M. et al. (2022). Fungal Engineered Living Materials. Nature Communications. Retrieved from https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29571-3
Vogue. (2022). Meet the Creative Who Helped Grow Living Plants on Clothes for Loewe. Retrieved from https://www.vogue.com/article/loewe-living-plants-fashion
Vogue. (2022). Living, breathing, wearable plants? Inside the rise of biocouture. Retrieved from https://www.vogue.com/article/biocouture-living-clothing
Thaler v. Commissioner of Patents [2021] FCA 879 (Australia); Thaler v. Hirshfeld, No. 1:20-cv-00903 (D.D.C. 2021).
