Mick Hartley

Well hey, why not:

Alexander McQueen, the celebrated fashion designer who committed suicide in 2010, liked to provoke. His 2001 asylum-themed collection, for example, culminated with a fleshy, nude woman reclining in a glass cube, breathing through tubes connected to a face mask as large live moths fluttered around her.

So it’s reasonable to think he would have approved of a new project based, literally, on his life. Tina Gorjanc, who is just finishing the material futures program at McQueen’s alma mater, London’s famous fashion school Central Saint Martins, is working on a project that will use McQueen’s DNA to grow skin, which she plans to tan and turn into leather jackets and bags. The skin will even bear tattoos based on the exact “locations, size, and design,” of McQueen’s, she says….

Gorjanc’s project is intended to raise questions about how corporations might one day exploit genetic information for luxury goods, and to showcase how little protection exists for a person’s DNA. In May, she filed an application to patent, as she describes it, “bioengineered genetic material that is grown in the lab using tissue-engineering technology and the process of de-extinction.” De-extinction allows you to extract genetic material from a deceased source.

Raising questions about how corporations might one day exploit genetic information for luxury goods by, um, exploiting genetic information for luxury goods? This woman will go far.

Though of course it's really all about the art:

Though she has been approached by some who want to produce the items for sale, Gorjanc says the finished products would more likely be displayed in a gallery. She would consider selling them to a collector, but is more focused on the technology, which might be useful in creating sustainable, lab-grown leather that doesn’t require slaughtering animals.

It adds a whole new level to the phrase "Who are you wearing?"

Of course human skin in the manufacture of luxury goods does have a pedigree, of sorts.