Around the age of four, Roni Gamzon had a faux-fur coat that she wanted to wear “everywhere”, she said.
It was white with black, inkblot-like spots – as if Cruella De Vil had skinned some Dalmatian puppies – and she thought a lot about that look after a meeting with Martin Stubler, a bioengineer, and Steven Usdan, a textile recycler, in 2022.
Gamzon, now 26, grew up between Tel Aviv and Singapore, and studied computer science.
At the time of the 2022 meeting, she was developing a fashion-tech startup to help the luxury fashion world engage with Gen Z.
But she wanted to move into fashion sustainability, and thought that the area in which one could have the “biggest impact” was textile innovation.
Stubler, 35, who had worked for MycoWorks, famous for making mushroom leather, and Usdan, 64, a founder of Giotex, the textile waste recycler in Mexico, were developing an alternative to animal and synthetic fur.
Fur is, of course, a long-documented (and at times debated) animal welfare issue.
But there is also the environmental aspect: Pelts are treated with a variety of chemicals, and faux fur, like that of Gamzon’s childhood coat, is almost always made from polyester and acrylic, which are plastics.
Gamzon had met Stubler that year at a sustainability conference for startups in Paris, where he showed her handmade swatches of prototype plant fur.
“It stuck with me,” she said. “This needs to be in the world.”
In 2023, Gamzon helped Stubler and Usdan found BioFluff, a fashion-tech company based in New York and Paris that makes plastics-free fur, shearling and fleece from plants and silk (Stübler exited this past summer).
On a cold morning in February, at an office inside La Maison Des Startups – an incubator run by LVMH to foster innovation, including BioFluff’s, in the luxury sector – Gamzon, now the company’s chief commercial officer, petted a swatch of spotty fur made from flax and inspired by Dalmatians.
“It was one of the first things I wanted to do,” she said with a laugh.
Read more: Animals in fashion: From runways to collections, when is it too far?
The right puff
Early on, Gamzon talked to designers about how the faux fur – which she named Savian, after the Hebrew word sometimes used to describe the fluffy white seed head of dandelions and groundsels – should look and feel.
The things that always came up were the level of shine and the “softness and puffiness”, she said.
BioFluff worked up a material that was more voluminous than the prototype and then introduced Savian in late 2023 at COP28, the UN global climate summit, in collaboration with designer Stella McCartney, who used it for a long black coat.
In 2024, the Danish brand Ganni exhibited versions of its Bou bag made with Savian (neither product was produced for retail).
BioFluff now has two fur lines, with products backed on viscose: Savian Naturals, made from plant fibers like hemp, flax and nettle that are sometimes blended with lyocell, a rayon fiber; and Savian Silks, made from silk fibres.
While making silk normally involves killing silkworms, the company’s look book notes the material’s “broad acceptance” even among animal-conscious brands.
A planned third line, a plush, will target the stuffed toys market.
And while BioFluff says that Savian Naturals is the world’s first 100% plant-based fur, the Shanghai-based faux furrier Ecopel has in recent years been working on similar options.
Ecopel released Flur – a faux fur made from nettle fibres – in the spring of 2024.
Ecopel’s sustainability manager, Arnaud Brunois-Gavard, said in an email that the material was still available but that its development was “on pause” while the company focused on options that allowed for a “greater variety of fur”.
In 2019, McCartney developed a faux fur with Ecopel and the US chemical company DuPont that was 37% derived from corn-waste fibres.
BioFluff says they do not use such bioplastics.
BioFluff makes Savian with retrofitted machinery at existing textile mills outside Florence, Italy.
Savian’s textures are inspired by animals – with names like Dalmatian, Cheetah, Bambi, Pony, Wolfy and Beaver, and with colourways ranging from cherry and coral to caramel and steel grey – but Gamzon said the goal was not for the faux furs always to look and feel like actual pelts (or plastics, for that matter); instead, the material can be “its own thing”, she said, “like a veggie burger”.
A preliminary third-party life-cycle assessment, commissioned by the company in 2023 with a grant, indicated that the carbon emissions associated with BioFluff’s plant fur were at least 75% below those of plastic fur, Usdan said (life-cycle assessments determine a product’s environmental impact over its life cycle).
In a landfill, Savian can biodegrade within a few years, he added, whereas polyester and acrylic fur can take centuries to biodegrade.
Savian can also be industrially composted within 12 weeks.
But real-world industrial composting of biodegradable fashion, which requires infrastructure ranging from waste collection and sorting operations to appropriate facilities, is “not going to exist any time soon”, said Annie Gullingsrud, the chief strategy officer at Trashie, a textile and electronics donation platform.
This is owing in part to a dearth of the necessary infrastructure, she said.
Gullingsrud said she had reckoned with the work around developing sustainable materials that she and her colleagues were doing a decade ago: “We were dreaming. I had to learn to focus on the things with the most impact potential.”
There are two chief sustainability problems in fashion, as she sees it.
“The CO2 problem” and the “waste problem” – or what to do with the dumped garments.
“The fur-coat category is minuscule,” she added, and unless BioFluff can produce Savian as cheaply as polyester, and unless it finds wider use for its products, the company is likely to have “very little impact” given the output of companies like Amazon, Shein, Temu and Quince, she said.
Read more: Fashion’s carbon push shifts costs to suppliers, according to industry sources
An inflection point
BioFluff is opening its first showroom in Paris this week, and Savian has appeared on several runways this season.
This watershed moment comes at a time when animal fur has more or less fallen out of favor in the fashion world.
Kering, the group that owns Saint Laurent and Balenciaga, went fur-free in 2022.
Oslo, Helsinki and Amsterdam had all banned animal fur at their fashion weeks by the time the British Fashion Council banned fur at London Fashion Week in 2023.
A ban on fur at Copenhagen Fashion Week and a ban on sales of new fur in California went into effect that same year.
In October, Conde Nast decided against using fur in the editorial content and advertising of its brands, including Vogue.
This month, the Television Academy banned fur from the Emmys red carpet, and a fur ban at New York Fashion Week – which the Council Of Fashion Designers Of America voted on in December – goes into effect in September.
While Gamzon said that BioFluff saw a “spike in interest” after the council’s ban, designer Aurora James noted in February that vintage fur was also seeing a “crazy uptick”.
She added: “I think the ban was really funny timing because every girl I know is trying to find, like, the best vintage fur coat right now. I don’t think people necessarily saw that coming.”
Alternative fur in the real world
Collina Strada is the first runway brand to sell pieces made with Savian, which was featured in its Autumn/Winter 2026 runway show during New York Fashion Week in February.
Hillary Taymour, the designer behind the New York-based vegan brand, described Savian as “such a good alternative”.
She met Gamzon at a Climate Week round table in New York last fall. After receiving swatches of Savian Naturals at Christmastime, she placed an order in early January.
“We sewed it up roughly, gathered it, put it to a test – it sews up like normal material,” Taymour said. “It’s super soft. It hits all the check marks.”
Her collection included a hood, a muff/bag, a wrap and a jacket made with brown Wolfy, as well as one of the brand’s Paw Paw coats in snow-leopard-patterned Pony that she overlayed with plaid organza.
The standard material costs US$20 to US$53 (approximately RM 80 to RM212) a meter and is “expensive compared to midrange polyester furs”, Taymour said.
Martine Rose, a menswear designer, used some Savian (which she said over email she loved “for its aesthetic”) across her Autumn/Winter 2026 jersey, denim, sportswear and outerwear pieces.
There were detachable fur collars and some “party sleeves” made in cherry-coloured Mongolian, BioFluff’s answer to wavy East Asian sheepskin.
And Louis Vuitton used the Wolfy version of Savian for a vest in its Autumn/Winter 2026 womenswear collection at Paris Fashion Week (the garment also uses polyester fur).
Gamzon acknowledged that this wasn’t an easy field to get into, and that BioFluff had experienced a number of near misses.
For example, she said, “all the creative director changes” at many of the major design houses “have made the process very difficult”.
But she remains optimistic that the next Autumn/Winter season is going to be "even stronger.”
Seeing more of their product on runways and in stores would be welcome, she said.
“We’ve had our heart broken a lot.” – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
