Living Colour Collective is a designer duo who work on the intersection of textile design, bacterial dyeing and fashion. Laura and Ilfa met in the TextileAcademy in Amsterdam, where for the first time they successfully experimented with dyeing with naturally pigmented bacteria. Passionate about new possibilities to disrupt the status quo of textile dyeing they formed Living Colour Collective. 

In the past years they took part in multiple design research projects focused on embracing beauty created in a close relationship with nature. Released in 2020 – Design to Fade capsule collection was a result of their collaboration with Puma. One of their latest endeavours is a project created in collaboration with Vienna Textile Lab called BInc.ink. The goal was to develop a method of sustainable printing with microorganisms, accessible to a wider audience. We met online to dive deeper into factors which are important to take into consideration while discussing the impact of colours, consumer perception of colour properties and challenges of shifting the paradigm of working with colours amongst (textile) designers.

Julia | AoSC : Can you briefly describe your dyeing method and explain what is sustainable about it?

Ilfa | Living Colour Collective : We use several dyeing methods. Live dyeing technique is one of them. It is a technique where bacteria are organically growing a living pattern on the textile. The second dyeing method is when we work with a dye extract. We let the bacteria grow in a petri dish, after that we are harvesting colour and then we dye uniform textiles with it. And what do we think is sustainable about our approach? We don't use any toxic chemicals in the process, that’s why it is more friendly for the environment and people than the petrochemical dyes. Also we can dye at a room temperature and finally, our dyeing methods consume less water. Those are the key points for sustainability of our practice.

Julia | AoSC : We’ve heard that it is hard to assess water usage because of the need to take into an account the full lifecycle of the product. Do you know any research about water usage proving bacterial dyeing methods are less water consuming than the synthetic ones or did you test it yourself?

Laura | Living Colour Collective : When we talk about synthetic dyes, we need to acknowledge that there are also different dyeing methods that use different amounts of water. That’s why it is difficult to assess the levels of water consumption of bacterial dyes because we also have different methods and first we need to ask what we compare it to. There are European guidelines for water consumption in textile dyeing which indicate the maximum amount of water you should use and process. That's the benchmark we compare our water usage to and we know we are way below it.

Ilfa | Living Colour Collective : When you are dyeing textiles, there's always water involved. Except if you are using a very innovative, waterless dyeing technique. In the live dyeing technique, water is used only in the nutrients for microorganisms. And if we are working with the extraction dye technique we also don't need to add extra water.

Julia | AoSC : What's the scope of your projects now? You say that you don't need to add water even if you work with colour extraction, how will the amount of water differ when you'd like to dye more textiles?

Ilfa | Living Colour Collective : Of course, if we are working in bigger volumes, then the volume of the nutrients is getting bigger. Then obviously we need to have more water, yet it is still within the guidelines for the water usage Laura mentioned before. But we know that to dye a t-shirt with conventional dyeing methods it takes up to 5,5 l* of water, while to dye the same t-shirt with the method we use, is 90% less. That already puts in perspective promising possibilities to reduce water usage in the future.

Julia | AoSC : How do you fixate colour on the fabric?

Laura | Living Colour Collective : We don't use anything to fix the colour. With the live dyeing process, we do use steam. But that's because we want to kill the bacteria at the end of the dye cycle. Of course steam will help set the colour, but we also did a test of colour fastness on the dyeing fabrics with the extract dyeing technique where we didn’t use steam or heat and the fastness was the same.

Julia | AoSC : What are your favourite materials to work with? You did a project where you experimented with dyeing small shoe parts such as laces or plastic buttons. Is there a limitation to materials you can dye with bacteria?

Laura | Living Colour Collective : We are anchored in the textiles industry. We like to try bacterial dyeing on all of the material kinds we come across, but our main focus is still textiles, which work very well with bacterial dyes. What is unique about bacterial pigment is that it bonds well with both natural and synthetic fibres, which gives it advantage in comparison to plant-based natural dyes which don't work very well with the latter category.

Ilfa | Living Colour Collective : Our favourite textile is silk or a silk mix. We had very nice outcomes with this fabric. We experiment with lots of synthetic textiles which are giving very different outcomes in comparison to silk. What makes our work and research really fun is that we keep discovering so many options with all the existing materials.

Julia | AoSC : What was the result of your attempt to dye leather with bacteria?

Ilfa | Living Colour Collective : We tried to dye it with the live dye technique, but that didn't go so well. Yet we found out that using the dye extract on leather is suitable. We did it also with the Puma collection and it went very, very well and we got very good results on this.

Julia | AoSC : Part of our goal in Atlas of Sustainable Colours is to highlight the locality as an important part of sustainable transitioning towards better practices. Are you working with local ingredients or suppliers? Do you know where your bacteria come from?

Laura | Living Colour Collective : They come from microbial databases - the one that universities have access to. We work with the bacteria from the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, with whom we have collaborated from the beginning of our journey. We always aim to source textiles for dyeing locally and we choose ecological or deadstock fabrics. The other ingredients we use in the lab, such as medium that the bacteria feed off, we also source locally, but we don't actually know where it's being made. I have not come across any kind of certification for these growth media. We are working on finding recipes to allow us to make our own medium by using waste products.

Laura | Living Colour Collective : We also let the students from Rotterdam University source some ingredients for medium from byproducts of the chemical industry. But that led to different colour results. Students tested one ingredient, which didn’t have a lab grade or medical grade, and it didn't work that well. And that’s significant. There was a significant difference between the ingredients they used.

Julia | AoSC : Does it mean that the quality of nutrients can also influence the colour outcome?

Laura | Living Colour Collective : Yes, exactly.

Julia | AoSC : I know that you like to work with high-end products and find partners with the same philosophy. Are you working mainly on research projects? Do you already work with the customers or clients?

Laura | Living Colour Collective : We do both - research is always involved also in the commissioned projects because we don't have a commercial process yet. So those are always explorative, conceptual product projects, which are still prototypes.

Katya | AoSC : What kind of partner are you usually approached by?

Laura | Living Colour Collective : A lot of fashion brands, also textile, dyers, a lot of material libraries. But also completely different industries. I've been working on a project for automotive, for example, which is very different.

Katya | AoSC : What kind of barriers and challenges have you been facing so far in your projects?

Laura | Living Colour Collective : One challenge is related to commercial application market entry. If you enter the market with a new type of dye, you want to reassure people that it's safe to wear and to work with. That means you would have to get some kind of certification, or at least testing. Certifications are very expensive. And that's also something that we never had the budget for. We're looking into funding which can help us get there. We also would like to do a toxicity testing. As we said, we don't use toxic chemicals in the process, but it doesn't mean that the bacterial pigments are not harmful in any other way. We've done some minor tests with the University. We did the literature research and so far our methodology seemed safe. But we want to have official tests done that give us reassurance, because the last thing we want is to create new problems when introducing this innovative dyeing approach.

Another challenge is in the scaling of the live dyeing process. Scaling of the dye extract is doable thanks to collaborating with such partners as Vienna Textile Lab, who can scale this for us. But the live dyeing technique is a completely unusual way of dyeing, and the labs are not equipped to scale this yet. That's something that really stays small and artisanal. There is a demand for a larger production capacity, but we are not yet in the place where we can offer it.

Julia | AoSC : I really love what you said in the interview with Nomad magazine about unlearning the processes and about challenging the status quo of dyeing. Have you already observed any societal changes since you started and now what changed and what do you think still needs to change between us, people, designers society, for this kind of methods to be more favoured or used widely? What do you think still needs to change or how can we work towards changing this mindset to make alternative dyeing methods more popular?

Laura | Living Colour Collective : First of all, we can see how the industry of colour has been perfected. Developed for so many years, led us to the point that we can get the exact same shade or tint every time. Synthetic colours have to be matched all the time with different standards, and it's perfected in such a way that it's really hard to let that go off for most people. For instance, when we started the project with Puma, they were super open to all the possibilities about the bacterial colours. But when we got further along in the process, we started talking about future possibilities to develop a commercial collection but the standard procedures such as colour fastness got in our way. Those things are very important, because you want to have quality standards that brands, and their consumers are used to. If you decide to produce a sports outfit, and you know that the natural colour may fade over time and with use, especially by exposure to sunlight, you have to find a way to communicate it to your clients and manage their expectations. So it's a really new way to approach colour. A new way of looking at colour as a tool which can make products much more personal. We like to bring an example of denim, where the fading of the jeans is what makes the product that exceptional. It's industrially pre–faded, and it looks like it has been worn before it hits the shops. People have developed all kinds of techniques to make a new pair of jeans look like the piece of denim we have owned for years. But it's brand new! We have to form a new relationship with colour, and look at it in a different way.

Ilfa | Living Colour Collective : Working with bacterial and natural colours asks for a different design approach. As designers we need to be able to send beautiful results with these dye techniques into the world to show what are the possibilities. Either if it's a consumer, or it's a future client that wants to buy the textile dyes, we need to take the lead and show them all kinds of colour applications. Laura explained that the majority of industry want to have exactly the same colour every time you dye textile with it. But when you work with natural dyeing techniques, that's not possible. That's also a huge part of the beauty and the artistic part of it, our colour development. So as designers, it's our job or our task to show that characteristic of bacterial and natural colours to the world. And to be a good example.

Julia | AoSC : What is your vision for the future of the dyeing industry? What would you like to see maybe in the future?

Ilfa | Living Colour Collective : I would like to see that the bacteria dyes are going to take a bigger part in the textile industry. There's also room for other innovative textile dyes, but of course, we think the bigger the better. So, if more sustainable dyes are taking over the petrochemical dyes, we would like to see in the future where petrochemical dyes at some point disappear from the whole industry.

Laura | Living Colour Collective : And that I also think it would be really nice to have natural microbial colours combined with very innovative dyeing techniques such as dyeing with CO2. Combining a waterless dyeing method with natural pigment seems like the best of both worlds.

Julia | AoSC : That's a very inspiring vision. What's your favourite colour?

Ilfa & Laura | Living Colour Collective : Living Lilac.

Julia | AoSC : Do you use specific names for your colours?

Laura | Living Colour Collective : Not really. Over a year ago, we were interviewed by Laura Perryman, a CMF Researcher who has published a book about colour. In one of the chapters she wrote about living lilac. When Laura asked what would be a name for our colour, we were totally surprised, we didn’t know! That’s when we came up with the living lilac and it stayed.

Ilfa | Living Colour Collective : We usually use the names of the bacteria strains. Because we also were not in the phase yet to name them. But this interview gave us some food for thought to rename the colours, which is another very interesting part of our practice.

Julia | AoSC : Indeed, when we talk about non-synthetic, very organic colours, the question arises - what will be the right name for the colour which is changing, can you find a word which will grasp the unique properties of such colour? In my opinion while working with nature based aesthetics we often fall into trying to stretch new ideas for all the old formats. That’s very inspiring to observe how Colourios people like you navigate through that shift. Thank you for the conversation!

*Herwig,O., 2021, Fashion to dye for, Nomad Magazine, issue no.10/2021, p.81