Neri Oxman dyes silk with living E. coli in Vigils project

Neri Oxman has made fabric dye a living process. Her studio, Oxman, sprayed a bacterial solution onto 3D-knitted silk and let a culture of billions of cells grow the colour itself.

The project is called Vigils. The studio developed it for designers, artists and collaborators to "create new forms of material and aesthetic expression", and it works less like dyeing than like gardening.

Tussah silk thread within the textile is coated with "bacterially sensitive chemicals", which act as "a bioreactor" (a vessel in which living organisms drive a chemical process) once mixed with the spray. The fabric then sits for 24 hours while the solution and chemicals interact, eventually producing a living bacterial culture.

That organism, "numbering in the billions of cells", spreads across the fabric and leaves amino acids in its wake, which colour the textile in faded indigo and pink.

How does the process work?

The Oxman lab created a spray solution containing the BL21 strain of Escherichia coli, a workhorse of biotechnology and synthetic biology research, and applied it to the silk.

Control comes from the designer's hand. The growth pattern is directed by "where and how densely the designer directed the culture to grow" via the spray, according to the team.

Then comes the rinse. The fabric is washed and dried, removing the bacteria. The pigment stays.

"The microorganisms respond to signals associated with the textile substrate, making biological activity an active component of the material process," the team said. "Vigils is a research-driven exploration of biological textile colouration."

Is this ready for industry?

Not remotely, and the studio says so. "The project is intended to investigate the interaction between synthetic biology and material systems rather than to represent a fully optimised industrial dyeing process," the team stated.

The technique has not undergone extensive Life Cycle Assessment (an audit measuring a product's environmental outputs) and remains at the prototype stage. Even so, the studio presents it as a possible alternative to "resource-intensive" industrial dyeing.

To demonstrate it, Oxman made four capes. They show the range of muted colours and patterns the bacteria produce — results Oxman argues conventional dyeing cannot replicate.

"The result is not simply an alternative way of applying color: the biological process becomes part of the design itself, producing patterns and variations that could not be achieved through conventional dyeing and making each textile an expression of the process that created it," Oxman said.

Who is Neri Oxman?

Oxman is known for her work in material ecology (design that treats products as biological systems rather than static objects). She opened a New York studio in Midtown Manhattan in 2024, unveiling an AI-designed skyscraper concept, Eden, to demonstrate its computational abilities at the time.

Her record carries a complication. She faced allegations of plagiarism in her PhD thesis completed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Vigils positions biological colouration as a design frontier, but until a Life Cycle Assessment confirms its environmental case, the four capes remain exactly what the studio calls them: research, not industry.