To produce a simple microbial dress on an industrial scale, a company would have to create a 3-D dress mold and drop it into an enormous fermentation vat so the bacteria could grow around it. For shoppers, the downside is that clothes made this way do biodegrade, but depending on how the materials were treated, it could take years for them to do so, Lee says. In fact, they’d still probably last longer than a cheap T-shirt.