Elmo Mistiaen
Elmo Mistiaen
Symbiotic Skin Metamorphosis
Belgian designer Elmo Mistiaen is fascinated by animals and insects. He designs digital landscapes and outfits in which humans and animals seem to merge. The TextielMuseum invited him to join the 2024 R&D knitting programme. With product developer Sarena Huizinga, Mistiaen experimented extensively with converting his digital AI art into 3D knitted body art and then feeding his AI tool with photos of samples made in the lab. This iterative process eventually led to a definitive design that is on display in the TextielMuseum until 30 March 2025 in the exhibition ‘SHAPE – body, fashion, identity’.
On the flat knitting machine with a coarse gauge, Huizinga translated the digital creations into oval-shaped bulges, ridges, pockets and tentacles. A subtle colour gradient runs through the work – from beige to pink to light brown – using various sustainable animal-sourced yarns. These include plant-dyed organic wool and cradle-to-cradle-certified silk from open silk cocoons that are discarded in standard silk production. Particularly innovative is the microbe yarn from Japanese manufacturer Spiber, which was used for the dark beige, semi-transparent parts of the jacket. The microbes, which are fed with sugarcane waste, produce a juice which is extracted, fermented and dried. The resulting substance is then sprayed into a single thread in a process called wet spinning.
Photos by Josefina Eikenaar, Patty van den Elshout andJelle Verheijke, commissioned by TextielMuseum
