Interview with Kent biomaterials designer Eirinn Hayhow

From vegan leather made using coffee granules to investigating the healing properties of natural materials to see if clothes can alleviate anxiety, fashion designer Eirinn Hayhow (@eirinnhayhow) is pushing the boundaries of innovative material production.

Being featured on famous industry platforms like Kaltblut, Fashion Scout (who are based in Broadstairs) and Vogue, Eirinn’s work using notions of science, philosophy and spirituality have caught the eye.

The former Canterbury school pupil returned to the city this summer with new show Noise & Flowers at Platform, also hosting pop-up natural dying sessions at Lush in the high street. With build-up to September’s London Fashion Week being particularly poignant to Eirinn this year, it’s fair to say there’s a lot going on.

“Yeah, there has been some momentum, which is really good,” she says. “It’s still hard to make a living full-time from it and the thing is, what I do is quite niche as well. But yeah, there’s a couple more stores that have my stuff and then more publications have been interested.”

“I’ve also been using living moss and putting it on to nettle yarn. And so if you want to keep it alive, you have to sort of spray it maybe once a week with water!”

— Eirinn Hayhow

The designer, who grew up in Whitstable, is a member of the British Fashion Council this year and will show off new pieces under the heading ‘Into The Mystic’ within the official Fashion Week schedule.

“And it’s in the daytime, which apparently is a more legit thing to do than have a fashion show in the evening, when some people are just going to get p*ssed,” she says.

“It has gradually happened over the last four years. First, I kind of applied to get a profile and then I applied to have a digital listing, and then a physical fashion show, but it was off-schedule. So this year I applied to be a member and you have to have been a limited company for two years and, I guess, done certain things with them. So I have more contact with them about doing a show and how they can support me and stuff.”

We first encountered Eirinn back in 2019 during a show at Margate’s Turner Contemporary with The Waste Free Fashion Collective in which a group of designers and artists such as Sam ‘Dream Safari’ Giles created an entire catwalk show of clothes using waste material found along Kent’s coastline.

“I guess that was like the beginning of everything that we were doing,” she says. “And we were quite fortunate because the Turner would let us have the space for free and we would do really experimental fashion shows in the main space. Off the back of that we got some funding to do other shows like at the Nayland Rock in Margate.”

Studying for her Masters at UCA Rochester, where she was teaching as a lecturer in sustainable fashion until its recent closure, Eirinn took shows to the likes of Soho House in Berlin. Her extensive research into natural materials, from foraged herbs and waste vegetables to ‘slime moulds’, took her to Barcelona for a two-month course in biosciences and materials.

It wasn’t just for fashion - it could be for any kind of design, interior or architecture,” she says. “We learned how to do things with mushrooms and natural dyes… and then using textiles as scaffold, so how you can grow crystals on materials and all this kind of really mad stuff like dying with bacteria.”

A personal quest to create a real-looking leather jacket that is both vegan and totally natural using pineapple leather (which is very expensive to do) led to a new technique using coffee grounds.

“It is basically a combination of different plants and seaweed - and then coffee granules is what gives it the colour and the pattern,” she says. “My neighbour has a company called We Out Here Coffee and so she gives me her waste coffee granules and then I’ll turn that into leather.

“I’ve started to use different plants like lavender and chamomile and certain herbs that I could put into the material, so that when you wear it you can smell it”

— Eirinn Hayhow

“I got a little bit bored of it always being brown, so what I do now is when I do my natural dyes I use the wastewater from the natural dye and then I’ll feed that into my biomaterial to change the colours a little bit.”

Eirinn’s work aims to reconnect people to Earth, showing the power of our natural world using unique gender-fluid garments. The connection between the material and the person wearing it has come into even sharper focus.

“I’m doing a lot of work looking at different plants and flowers that people would use in medicine,” she explains. “But what I’m trying to discover is if we use them as material - so biomaterials, bioleathers and natural dyes. Is there potential that we can help with anxiety or other kinds of illnesses?

“I’ve started to use different plants like lavender and chamomile and certain herbs that I could put into the material, so that when you wear it you can smell it. I am producing garments from that, but it’s also probably a research stage.”

Eirinn’s show at London Fashion Week will have the themes of nature and folklore and is likely to take place in a community garden. But while previous collections have used elements of recycled materials - which sometimes contain man-made textiles - the new collection is aimed to be fully biodegradable.

“People have always liked the colourful knits, but they’re made from waste material, so the fibres are not in sync with the way I want to go with my brand,” she says.

“So for this collection, I’ve also been using living moss and putting it on to nettle yarn. And so if you want to keep it alive, you have to sort of spray it maybe once a week with water.

“All the colours I normally use are really sort of bright, but this time it’s more swampy and sludgy. So it’s all like browns and dark greens and kind of ambers. It’s interesting to work with those tones.”

Eirinn Hayhow will show Into The Mystic at London Fashion Week on September 15th.