Billionaire philanthropist Lauren Sánchez Bezos wants to change what your clothes are made of, and help offset fashion’s materials problem.
In late April, the Bezos Earth Fund, where Sánchez Bezos serves as vice chair, announced $34 million in grants to advance breakthrough materials for the fashion and textile industry. The money is split across four research tracks.
Columbia University and the Fashion Institute of Technology will share $11.5 million to grow a textile fiber from bacteria fed on agricultural waste. UC Berkeley gets $10 million for a biodegradable fiber inspired by spider silk—no silkworms, spiders, or plastic. Clemson University receives $11 million to gene-edit cotton with built-in color and performance. And the Cotton Foundation gets $1.5 million to restore a non-GMO cotton seedbank. Sánchez Bezos has become the more visible figure in the couple’s philanthropy, setting the pace at a fund racing to disburse the remaining roughly $7 billion of Bezos’s $10 billion climate pledge before 2030.
“These teams are growing fiber from bacteria, engineering cotton that comes out of the ground in color and creating silk-like fibers from compost,” Sánchez Bezos said in a statement. “That’s not just good for the planet. That’s the future of fashion.”
