When Modern Meadow publicly unveils its leather in the next month—in the form of a “reimagined” graphic T-shirt—it will not be at a store but at a fashion exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The company employs a chief creative officer as well as a professional tanner, and it’s been carefully cultivating its mystique. Modern Meadow doesn’t just want to imitate leather, the company keeps reiterating; it wants to reimagine leather, transcending the physical limits of a cow.

The T-shirt “will change the way you think about leather,” promised David Williamson, the company’s chief technology officer, though he could not yet reveal to me how.

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Modern Meadow was not always so interested in fashion. Its founders—CEO Andras Forgacs and his father and chief scientific officer Gabor Forgacs—had previously started the company Organovo to grow human tissue for medical and pharmaceutical research. Going from engineering human tissue to animal tissue, says Andras Forgacs, seemed like a logical next step. In 2011, they started Modern Meadow with the goal of growing leather and eventually meat in tissue culture.

But they quickly ran into a problem of economics. Organovo only had to make tiny quantities of tissue for medical purposes, which it could then sell at high prices. “The value of that is super high when you’re dealing with life and death,” says Forgacs. A steak requires growing many thousands of times more cow tissue, at a much lower price per ounce. The economics of leather are slightly better.

Forgacs tells me now that he had always planned to focus on leather first. But the idea of the lab-grown meat fits into an established narrative of what biotechnology is for, and meat’s ethical and environmental problems are more ubiquitous than leather’s. The meat angle got quite a bit of early press attention. As late as 2015, Modern Meadow was giving journalists a taste of cultured “steak chips.” Today, its website no longer has any mention of cultured meat.

Modern Meadow initially tried to grow cow skin cells for leather much like how it grew cow muscle cells for meat. Mammalian cells are finicky, however, and they require specific and nutrient-rich medium. The problems were twofold: One, the medium required to grow the cells includes serum extracted from unborn calves, thus negating any animal-free promises; and two, all kinds of unwanted bacteria and yeast will grow in a nutrient-rich medium, requiring expensive equipment to maintain sterility.

Williamson walked into these problems when he joined Modern Meadow from DuPont in 2015, and he eventually decided the mammalian cells had to go. Modern Meadow was going to get into hardy, fast-growing yeast. “Yeasts are the things you worry about contaminating your mammalian tissues,” says Williamson. And since yeast is already widely used to manufacture molecules of interest—alcohol for beer and wine, for example—there is plenty of ready-made industrial-scale equipment tailored to yeast fermentation.