A handbag made of lab-grown T-Rex leather made headlines – and will no doubt take a bite out of awards season too. Bas Korsten tells us the tale behind the dino hide.
“You’d look pretty good in a T-Rex leather jacket,” jokes Bas Korsten, as we discuss the latest eyebrow-raising product to emerge from VML under his watch.
To be more accurate, lab grown T-Rex leather was made possible by a collaboration between the agency, scientists, and a fashion brand. The symbol of the project is a genuine T-Rex leather handbag, unveiled earlier this month at the Art Zoo Museum in Amsterdam, right beside a life-size cast of a T-Rex skeleton.
Officially, Bas is VML’s Global Chief Creative Officer, Innovation and Chief Creative Officer, EMEA. Just before our interview, one of his colleagues referred to him as “the mad scientist of the advertising industry”. Bas is gracious enough to chuckle at this, but he is after all the man who got an AI to paint a new Rembrandt many years before the technology was widely available.
T-Rex leather feels like a sequel of sorts to another award-winning initiative: the Mammoth Meatball from 2023, which was a brilliant way of showing what could be done with lab-grown meat. Except, admits Bas, it had a flaw.
“The problem was that you couldn’t taste it,” he says. “But T-Rex leather can actually be touched and worn.”
Step into the lab…
Bas says he was actually thinking about T-Rex leather even before he embarked on the meatball project. “I was already in touch with Professor Ernst Wolvetang at The Organoid Company, but at the time the technology was not quite advanced enough.”
That technology is the Advanced Tissue Engineering Platform at Lab-Grown Leather, which joined with VML and The Organoid Company to bring the dinosaur hide to life, in a manner of speaking.
The way they did it is complex. They started with fossilized T-Rex collagen. Using AI and computational biology, the team rebuilt the missing genetic code to complete the collagen blueprint. Then they synthesized this DNA and inserted it into host cells. Those engineered cells were grown at scale using Lab-Grown Leather’s proprietary ATEP platform and then fed directly into its production process.
The fourth collaborator in the team is the visionary fashion brand Enfin Levé, founded by Polish designer Michal Hadas, who is based in Berlin. Known for experimentation, “techwear”, and its use of innovative materials, Bas says that Enfin Levé was the perfect partner for designing the bag itself.
Obviously a T-Rex leather handbag is fun, but there is a serious side to all this. Bas says: “Lab-grown leather hasn’t really convinced in the past, particularly in the luxury sector, because it feels like an imitation of the real thing. So we decided to create a material that wasn’t a substitute, but something completely different.”
Hide in plain sight
As well as proving that we no longer have to kill animals for their hides, lab-grown leather is sustainable in other ways. The process of tanning leather involves chemical treatments, and we know that forests are cleared to make way for herds of cattle. The fact that dinosaurs died out due to extreme climate change provides a useful metaphor – and a reminder of what’s at stake.
As he’s based in Amsterdam and familiar with the Art Zoo Museum, Bas knew it was the ideal place to display the T-Rex bag. The beautiful 17th century canal house evokes the right note of luxury, and it has an incredible collection of taxidermy alongside our prehistoric protagonist.
The bag is expected to fetch more than its starting price of 600,000 dollars at auction. Future items, while they may still be regarded as luxury products, are likely to be more accessible. Bas says: “This is not a one-off. We’re going to make sure the material is available to other brands and designers. So you may soon find yourself wearing some T-Rex leather.”
Hence the leather jacket comment. I remember that Bas took the Mammoth Meatball on a tour, notably to the Cannes Lions festival. Where can we touch T-Rex hide if we can’t make it to Amsterdam, or bid for the bag at the auction? “Hopefully I’ll have a small piece of it with me,” he says. Personally I could go for a T-Rex leather wallet. Even without the teeth and claws, it should be the ultimate protection for your cash.
