Kombucha Dress

Do y'all remember kombucha, touted as a health booster, which is basically made using a weird yeasty kombucha starter and grown in a medium of strong black tea and sugar? It ferments up into a vinegary tonic with a mild effervescence. It's supposed to be good for what ails ya; I actually have a bottle of it from New Leaf Market and toss a bit into my green tea from time to time, to keep myself a proper Santa Cruzan. I once, summers ago, made my own kombucha, and did a great job of it--except that it was necessary to save the yeasty kombucha starter thing to make other batches, and it unfortunately looked like the unholy spawn of a latex glove and a tree fungus. As the kombucha creature grew in size, Mr. Strega became increasingly worried as I had to use ever-larger jars to hold it. Finally, he began to worry that it would become like the Blancmange from Monty Python, so we gave it a proper burial and I decided to leave kombucha-brewing to others with greater wisdom, experience, and storage space.

Well, now you can have sort of a kombucha dress (the link has a picture of a lady wearing the kombucha dress; it is probably not for the eyes of kids, as it is clingy--and it's just such a weird picture on so many levels). Apparently some intrepid person has learned to create dresses from "cellulose woven by bacteria in a vat of fermenting wine." Even worse, the cellulose mats are molded around a blow-up doll to form the dress. As Mr. Strega said in an entirely different context, "You just have to wonder how a process like that evolved." Ferment-to-order garments aren't exactly the fashion innovation I've been waiting for.