Would you wear a leather jacket made of Alexander McQueen's skin?

They say that fashion is only skin deep, but Tina Gorjanc is taking this phrase to a whole new level.

Gorjanc is a recent graduate of the Material Futures program at the well-known art school Central Saint Martins in London, England. As part of her degree show, she exhibited Pure Human, a collection of jackets and handbags made out of pig skin but designed to look like McQueen's real skin, including freckles and tattoos. Her aim is to eventually recreate these items using skin grown from McQueen's own DNA, using a process called de-extinction —   extracting genetic information from a deceased source, and then using that information to grow tissue.

In this case, the tissue is skin to be used as fabric, and the deceased source is Alexander McQueen.

Even though McQueen graduated from the same school as Gorjanc, she had another reason for choosing his DNA.

"I wanted to target someone that should be more protected than an average person - he has a lot of people that would inherit either his personal or intellectual property but genetic information is not protected"

For Gorjanc, this project is really about exposing the loose threads when it comes to patent law for human DNA. While you can't patent a specific person's DNA, in many parts of the world you can patent the product of a specific person's genetic material. For Gorjanc, the technology has grown faster than the legislation around it.

"I'm trying to provoke people to think about how we actually don't have protection regarding genetic materials"

As you can imagine, Pure Human has raised more than a few ethical eyebrows.

"The first reaction was shock… and then I think some of the people understood the concept behind it".

Pure Human is provocative by design, an approach that defined McQueen's career. After all, this is a man who cast models as chess pieces on a life-sized board, staged a high-profile show in a bus depot and even sent one model down the runway to be spray-painted by robots. 

Although Gorjanc will never know what the man behind the DNA truly thinks of her project, she has had some hopeful reactions so far. "I got a response from a couple people that knew him that he might actually like [that] idea because it's kind of up his alley. It's what he did — to provoke".