Patricio Campillo’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection brought Polybion’s Celium, a cellulose grown by bacteria from Mexican fruit waste, to three runway looks at New York Fashion Week.
When Patricio Campillo sent his closing look down the runway at the Downtown Manhattan Heliport on Sept. 13, the textured red jacket and trousers looked, at a glance, like leather. The set was made from a biologically derived polymer grown by bacteria — a material whose story begins in the fruit fields of central Mexico, where the biotechnology company Polybion turns agricultural leftovers into sheets of cultivated cellulose.
The Mexico City designer’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection, “In Medias Res,” worked Polybion’s Celium into three runway looks. Two versions of the material appeared, the translucent Celium Manto and the more tactile Celium Espumante, the latter including a marbled terracotta shade Polybion calls Iron Strata. Around them, the collection moved through sun-washed pinks, yellows, oranges, and reds while exploring memory, transformation, and the relationship between clothing and the body.
“The show is inspired by the Latin term, in media res, which is a term that refers to something that is in the becoming,” Campillo told mitú. “The inspiration is to make those moments that look unintentional, intentional,” he said.
Celium starts with nutrients recovered from agroindustrial fruit streams, which bacteria consume before organizing themselves into a three-dimensional network of cellulose. Polybion then harvests, stabilizes, refines, and finishes that cellulose into a material brands and designers can cut and sew. Forbes reported in 2022 that the fermentation stage takes 20 days and that the whole process, from raw material to finished product, happened within a 30-mile radius of Irapuato, Guanajuato, where the company is based.
“Cowhide tanning uses approximately 30 liters of water per square foot,” Polybion says. “By comparison, the stabilization process of Celium uses about 5 liters.”
Brothers Axel and Alexis Gómez-Ortigoza founded the company, and its feedstock comes from a point in the supply chain most shoppers never see. “We’re not talking about food waste at the point of sale, at a supermarket or restaurant,” Axel Gómez-Ortigoza, Polybion’s co-founder and CEO, told Frontier Magazine. “We’re talking about agricultural products that do not even leave the farms. Lots of waste is created ‘pre-market’: in the fields, at processing facilities, at brokers. We’re diverting materials from those streams first.”
He sees that local supply as the heart of the model. “The raw materials for biology are everywhere,” he told the magazine. “Wherever there are humans, there is agriculture and waste.”
Polybion describes its collaboration with Campillo through an idea it calls biocraft, in which biology gives craft a new starting point. Biotechnology grows the material’s structure, chemistry and material science develop its performance, and human hands refine its color, texture, surface, and form. The company summed up the partnership in its announcement with the line “From Mexican craft to Mexican biocraft,” and Gómez-Ortigoza has long framed the science in similar terms. “Biology is the most advanced technology we have,” he told What Design Can Do.
Campillo was born and raised in Mexico City and spent much of his childhood in Zacualpan, where charrería, Mexico’s equestrian tradition, shaped his aesthetic. He studied in Madrid and launched his label as The Pack before relaunching it under his own name. His menswear treats the charro suit and Mexican artisanal references as living codes to be reworked, and Celium extends that thinking to the cloth itself.
“It’s an ongoing process of evolving certain codes and recontextualizing what it means to be a man, what it means to be a Charro, and what it meant a few decades ago,” Campillo told Surface ahead of his Fall 2025 show, where he presented 24 looks above the Manhattan skyline. “The idea is to elevate menswear. It’s flirting with couture,” he told the magazine.
New York has become the stage for that work. “New York, for me, is the fashion capital where the brand has a community, and where people are avid to have a Latino designer,” he said. For Polybion, the heliport show demonstrated what a biologically grown material can do once it enters an established creative and manufacturing system, and for Campillo, it paired a material from a Guanajuato biotech company with a label built in Mexico City.
“I am proudly Mexican,” he told mitú, “and I was raised with those stimuli and with those references, so I think it’s inherent to my work that this happens.”
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