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It was a most intriguing request. “I would love to be a human coral,” said Tekoui ‘Jérémie’ Tamari to biodesigner Chris Bellamy, one night around the campfire.
Bellamy had traveled to French Polynesia hoping to craft new materials inspired by nature and had spent weeks with the Indigenous communities there, learning about their culture, wondering how his skills as an engineer and designer could be applied locally. It was the challenge he had been looking for.
Bellamy worked with Jérémie, a local spear fisherman and drum maker, and “made him a swimsuit,” Bellamy said. It glowed in the dark with the light of hundreds of bioluminescent algae, encapsulated into a gel, stitched into fabric. Jérémie was a human scaffold for living algae, as close to being a human coral as you could get. The bioluminescence was more than artistic flourish. It helped light the way when Jérémie went fishing at night.
Bellamy also made a bioluminescent drum, and a necklace. The project felt like it was finally wrapping up. That’s when he got an email from Iris van Herpen, the Dutch haute couture designer. She had seen the swimsuit, and the drum, and she was coveting a living dress for her 2025 summer collection, to premier in Paris in July.
You could stroke [the cells] with a feather and they would … respond and emit light
Like Jérémie, van Herpen was looking for an artistic way to express and embody symbiosis in nature through her designs. Her July collection is titled Sympoiesis, from the Greek for “co-creating.” But what van Herpen wanted seemed too complex, Bellamy said, a full gown with intricate corsetry, wrapping limbs and body, and a cape. “It was completely impossible” Bellamy said. Still, he agreed to give it a go.
Algae are masters of symbiosis, and the species used by Bellamy, Pyrocystis lunula—named after their crescent-moon-like shape—is a close relative of coral-inhabiting algae. Pyrocystis cells are strikingly large, as wide as a strand of hair, and among other species, are responsible for “Zeevonk,” bioluminescent blooms of algae that paint the seaside in a mysterious glow, which is especially bright where waves break at the shore. Each cell glows brightly when it is touched, “it’s incredibly responsive,” Bellamy says. “You could stroke [the cells] with a feather and they would … respond and emit light.”
In the wild, their bioluminescence is a result of a defense mechanism that arises in response to disturbances in the water. When a predator approaches they flash a bioluminescent light, which serves as a warning signal and can even attract secondary predators that hunt the primary predator of the cells. This is commonly referred to as the “burglar alarm” mechanism.
Bellamy came across the cells, and the method for how to encapsulate them in a gel, from a 2023 publication in Science Advances. The goal of that work, a collaboration between University of Amsterdam and the University of California, San Diego, was to produce a flexible yet resistant material which emits light upon mechanical deformation. “These cells, they actually have this immense bandwidth of what they can sense,” said Nicho Schramma, one of the study’s co-authors. “They are extremely sensitive, but they can also still respond to very strong forces.”
Bellamy partnered with Schramma to grow and mold the living material, which dressmakers at Maison Iris van Herpen then used to create the dress. “It took three months of experimentation,” said Bellamy. “And then the night before the deadline to make the material for the show, I had the first sample that worked.”
Keeping the algae alive inside the gel is tricky. The cells thrive within a narrow temperature range and need nutrients and a saline solution to stay alive. The gel has to breathe, but too much exposure to the air can bring in contaminants, like bacteria or fungi, which can overgrow the algae inside. The hardest part was getting the consistency right, something “firmer than your granny’s jelly pudding,” said Bellamy, but that could still be squeezed through a syringe, molded and stitched into fabric.
The dress made its debut on the runway on July 7 in Paris, during Haute Couture Week. For Bellamy, the most interesting part of the project was observing the relationship that developed between Iris’s atelier and the material. “The material has a bedtime, the material has a wake-up time, the material gets jet lagged,” he said. “It’s that fragility that makes livingness so beautiful.” 
Lead photo by Jip Mus & Dammes Kieft
