Reimagining Printed Textiles by Rebecca Hoyes and Jo Pierce is an essential guide for designers, students, and creative practitioners looking to develop more environmentally responsible approaches to print textile design.
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hat if colour could grow?
Today, as the environmental toll of conventional textile production becomes increasingly clear, a new generation of innovators is imagining alternative ways of creating colour, surface, and material through living systems. For the print designer, this expands the idea of print beyond pigment on cloth.
Colour can be cultivated, surfaces can evolve and materials can be formed, inviting a more interconnected relationship with the natural world.
Design studios, start-ups and research institutions are looking closely at seaweed, algae, fungi and microorganisms to define new sources of colour and material innovation. Beyond simply finding a ‘natural alternative’ to synthetic dyes, their work proposes that the future of sustainable textile colour lies in fundamentally reexamining our connection to material ecosystems.
Seaweed is emerging as one of the most promising sources of colour, but the challenge is not just in producing a beautiful shade; it’s in creating systems capable of working at the scale required by the textile industry.
In the Netherlands, Zeefier is developing textile dyes from seaweed collected from beaches. Colourants are extracted from seaweed and used within existing industrial dyeing systems to produce dyed textiles at scale. Seaweed is not just a replacement for a synthetic dye. It is a biological resource within a new material economy that connects colour production with marine ecosystems, waste streams, and local resources.
This heightens narratives around provenance. Could a textile carry not only a colour but a story about where its colour originated?
In the US, Living Ink have developed ALGAE BLACK™, a pigment derived from waste algae, alongside ALGAE INK™ designed specifically for textile printing. Living Ink suggests a future in which waste algae biomass can become a source of printable colour rather than simply being discarded.
However, perhaps the most radical development is occurring beyond algae and seaweed altogether. Biotech companies are investigating microorganisms that can produce pigments themselves. Rather than growing a plant, harvesting it and extracting its colour, microorganisms can be cultivated under controlled conditions, effectively becoming biological colour factories. This offers opportunities for localised manufacturing, and the development of new models of consumer-facing engagement.
By integrating microbial fermentation into their supply chain, Colorifix are creating colour bio-banks through which freeze-dried colour-producing microbes can be distributed to customers, enabling them to grow their own colour at scale using a precise fermentation process. Research and design initiatives such as Faber Futures and Normal Phenomena of Life (NPOL), also explore microbial dyeing and fermentation for textile colouration. Establishing Normal Phenomena of Life as a direct-to-consumer brand producing biodesigned lifestyle objects has integrated biotechnology into the ‘real world’, taking colour out of the lab and onto the high street.
What if materials could live?
Print is no longer something applied to a surface but now part of a more considered and integrated relationship between material, process and colour.
The biomaterial innovation company Malai grows material through living processes, cultivating bacterial cellulose from fermented waste coconut water and combining it with plant fibres such as banana stem, hemp and sisal. The surface already carries its own texture, irregularity, and biological story, inviting the print designer to respond to the material's inherent qualities and properties rather than simply decorating it.
Through her project Rootfull, Zena Holloway demonstrates how living material can be grown and shaped into exquisite patterns and forms.
Reimagining Printed Textiles
These and many other industry and artisanal approaches featured in Reimagining Printed Textiles point to a shift in the designer's mindset. Colour, material, and pattern are no longer treated as separate considerations but point to a broader reimagining of the relationship between colour, material, pattern, and the living world.
Seaweed can become dye. Waste algae can become pigment. Bacteria can become colour-producing systems. Fungi can become textile structures. Fermentation can become a method of colour production. For designers, this opens a fertile territory between craft, science and technology.
The future of textile colour and materials may not be something we simply manufacture. It may be something we cultivate, grow, ferment, harvest and collaborate with.
You can find out more about Reimagining Printed Textiles here.
