Call it the purse of the prehistoric.
In what sounds like a luxury stunt cooked up after a late-night dinosaur movie, a team of scientists, designers and creatives says it has made the world’s first product from lab-grown T-Rex leather: a one-of-a-kind handbag that debuted in Amsterdam this month.
The bag was unveiled on April 2 at the Art Zoo Museum, where it is being displayed beside a massive Tyrannosaurus rex structure acquired from Naturalis Biodiversity Center. The setting was no accident. The whole idea is to put an object made with reconstructed dinosaur collagen next to the ancient creature that inspired it.
The project brings together creative agency VML, genomic engineering company The Organoid Company and Lab-Grown Leather Ltd. The handbag itself was designed by Enfin Levé, the avant-garde techwear label founded by Polish designer Michal Hadas. According to the source material, the companies began developing the material after announcing the ambition in 2025 to create the world’s first T-Rex leather. The material is expected to be offered to luxury brands later on.
The science behind it sounds almost as wild as the sales pitch. The team said it started with fossilized T.rex collagen sequences, then used computational biology and AI modelling to predict and reconstruct the missing genetic information needed for a full collagen blueprint. That synthesized DNA was inserted into a carrier cell line. From there, billions of engineered cells were cultivated using Lab-Grown Leather’s tissue engineering platform.
The companies say the result is leather that is structurally identical to traditional leather, but grown without animal slaughter, deforestation or chromium-heavy tanning. They also describe it as durable, repairable, biodegradable and fully traceable.
The bag is being treated as a collector’s item. After a six-week exhibition at Art Zoo, it will be auctioned to the highest bidder. Even so, the material itself is not meant to stay a museum curiosity. The team says T-Rex leather will continue to be produced, with early uses focused on luxury accessories and longer-term plans reaching into fashion, automotive and other high-performance materials.
Professor Che Connon of Lab-Grown Leather said, “Our proprietary advanced tissue engineering platform has once again proven its versatility. By collaborating with VML and The Organoid Company, we’re unlocking the potential to engineer leather from prehistoric species, starting with the formidable T-Rex. This venture showcases the power of cell-based technology to create materials that are both innovative and ethically sound.”
Thomas Mitchell, CEO of The Organoid Company, called it “a bold example of synthetic biology extending beyond medicine into sustainable material innovation.”
VML’s Bas Korsten put it more bluntly. “The stark reality is that lab-grown leather hasn’t yet convinced the luxury world. Why? Because it feels like an imitation. We knew we had to do something radically different. Not a substitute, but something entirely new. So we went back 66 million years in time.”
And Hadas said the material itself shaped the design: “It has a distinct character and responds unlike any leather we’ve worked with. The final bag follows that logic, letting the material define the object rather than forcing it into familiar codes of luxury.”
That may be the strangest part of this whole story. For all the futuristic biotech involved, the pitch is pretty simple. Go back about 68 million years, and you just might find a new way forward.
