Stella McCartney's Spring 2022 Collection Inspires a World of Fungi Research AOC Muse

Designer Stella McCartney’s Spring 2022 fashion show was inspired by mushrooms. Quite frankly, life on Anne of Carversville has not been the same since I watched on Netflix the 2019 ‘Fantastic Fungi’ documentary that prompted McCartney’s deep dive into the world of mushrooms.

Mushrooms are the visible part of an organism called mycelium, and they are not plants, even though they have a plantlike form. Even more important, until recently, fungi have been part of the botanist’s domain, and they were classified — incorrectly — as plants, writes the American Society For Microbiology in an article Three Reasons Fungi Are Not Plants.

Fungi and Africans: Both Misclassified and Misunderstood by Carl Linnaeus

Fungi were classified as plants for centuries due to an axiom attributed to Carl Linnaeus: “Plants grow and live; Animals grow, live and feel.”

Linnaeus’ delineation of plant activity seems inadequate and overly simplistic, given scientific research on the way in which plants experience sentient activity. We know that plants sense danger and then communicate their information to other plants, seeming to contradict Linnaeus’ assertions around plant life. NOT knowing his connection to racial categorization — I muttered to myself “Oh, right. In the same way some white dudes classified people of color as lesser-quality humans, they managed to ignore the profound distinctive attributes of fungi and mushrooms by calling them plants.”

Eureka! Linnaeus was deeply involved in the science of racial categorization. Rather than taking a sharp right turn in this post, AOC will stay with the fact that fungi can’t produce oxygen via photosynthesis, a core attribute of the plant kingdom.

It’s interesting when fashion, mushrooms and the civil rights movement come together in a single, cohesive thought pattern. Then again, the world of fungi is so primordial and pervasive in our biosphere that mycelium — the network of fungal threads or hyphae that produces the mushrooms we eat — strikes us as the very root of existence.

Stella McCartney is leading the way in working on the development of luxury leather made from mushrooms. The designer wants all of us to become curious about mushrooms, and I am now her dedicated disciple at AOC.