A leather bag made from Tyrannosaurus rex cells failed to sell on Thursday, the Paris auction house Drouot said, commenting that bids were well below expected.
Handbag misses $500,000 auction goal
Despite garnering worldwide attention, the first handbag made of leather extracted from T-rex cells did not sell at auction.
Drouot stated that the bids from the “one-of-a-kind” handbag were significantly lower than anticipated.
It was touted to sell for an estimated amount of $500,000, but it only reached $150,000, Alexandre Giquello stated, whose auction house is in charge of the sale.
The black, diamond-studded bag was eventually taken off the block at Hotel Drouot.
The bag was described by the auction house as a “scientific feat” that makes it possible to create leather “without any reliance on animal rearing,” and an object without precedent in the history of luxury.”
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From T-rex cell to fashionable handbag
The Organoid Company, Lab-Grown Leather Ltd., and creative agency VML collaborated to create the biomaterial using fossilised collagen fragments from T-rex fossils found in the United States.
After phylogenetic analysis, the reconstructed DNA was incorporated into the genome of a specific bio-leather cell line.
This made it possible for the cells to produce skin tissue, which was then processed and tanned into leather.
“In recent years, we’ve developed techniques – biotechnologies that allow us to instruct a cell culture to produce, so to speak, genuine T‑Rex skin in the laboratory,” palaeontology expert Iacopo Briano stated.
Briano pointed out that the material is different from vegan leather, which is primarily composed of plastic.
“In this case, it’s derived from a cell culture, so it’s 100% skin. And at the same time, it comes from an animal that went extinct 67 million years ago,” he added.
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