For the latest @Modern Synthesis newsletter, I reflected on the forces that are converging to make now the time for biomaterials 🌊
While we often think of progress as a gradual swell, real breakthroughs are rarely the sum of small improvements. Transformation happens when the right forces converge, and there we are – patiently watching, working, waiting – ready to harness the building momentum.
Then, like a wave, it breaks suddenly and powerfully, propelling us further than we ever imagined.
Today, we’re on the crest of such a wave in biomaterials. Breakthroughs in plastic-free performance are converging with growing consumer demand and a fashion industry primed for change. This echoes the transformative currents that have reshaped our world before – and often when we least expected it.
Take 1903, when the New York Times confidently predicted that manned flight was “millions of years" away. A mere nine weeks later, the Wright Brothers took to the skies in the first successful powered aeroplane.
Their flight was a technological triumph, to be sure. But it was a technological triumph made possible by novel advances in aeronautical theory, newly abundant weather data, and skyrocketing public fascination with “the flight race.” Together, these tailwinds lifted our first aviators to new heights – and with them, our estimations of what humanity can achieve.
Similar patterns of scepticism and surprise are unfolding across the biomaterial field today. While some critics question biomaterials’ long-term ability to meet fashion’s exacting performance targets, innovators like Modern Synthesis are leveraging emergent technologies to achieve performance parity without plastics.
This isn’t just a leap in performance, it’s a leap in possibilities – opening up new realms for creativity and design in fashion and beyond.
Modern Synthesis celebrates its fifth birthday this month. In the grand timeline of our 4.5 billion-year-old planet, five years is a mere blip. Yet, it’s often within these brief windows, when everything aligns, that the biggest changes come to life.
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