Mushrooms Are Growing on Publishing, Fashion, Hollywood

“I saw it on our mushroom table and picked it up,” Mr. Goldin says of the book, which Kirkus Reviews calls a “perspective-shifting guide to our microfungal matrix.”

Customers and staff so relish mushrooms that his store has a stand-alone display dedicated to all things fungi. Titles range from “How to Forage for Mushrooms Without Dying” by Frank Hyman to Victoria Romanoff’s “Mushroom Foraging and Feasting: Recollections and Recipes from a Lifetime on the Hunt.”

The lowly mushroom is having a star turn across publishing, fashion, Hollywood and Instagram.

Designer Stella McCartney’s website features what it describes as “the world’s first-ever luxury bag” made from mycelium, a leather alternative made from the threadlike roots of mushrooms. “Our Summer 2022 collection chooses to optimistically celebrate fungi—as the future not only of fashion, but our planet,” the site explains.

Ms. McCartney says some of her “fondest memories” are from her childhood on an organic farm in Scotland. “The freedom we experienced there in harmony with Mother Nature has had such an impact on how I approach the design of all my collections from conception to the materials I work with,” she adds.

Vogue magazine last year wrote about the impact mushrooms were having on the glamour set in the story “You Aren’t Tripping: Fungi Are Taking Over Fashion.” In mid-July, Vogue followed with a story about mushroom leather hats. “Slowly but surely,” the piece reported, “leather alternatives made from mycelium instead of animal hides have entered the market.”

Sarah Spellings, the Vogue fashion news editor who wrote the hat story, says she recently acquired an

Hermès

print silk scarf embellished with mushrooms after she saw it mentioned or worn by people on Instagram. In the fashion world, mushrooms represent a source of creative inspiration and the embrace of nature, she says: “They have a deeper meaning if you dig into it, no pun intended.”

Fungi featured in the hit TV comedy series “Ted Lasso,” when Coach Beard, a man of few words, is seen reading “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures” by Merlin Sheldrake. Mr. Sheldrake, a biologist and author who has more than 50,000 followers on Instagram, later proudly tweeted a still from the show.

“The book has seeped into the culture,” says Hilary Redmon, who edited “Entangled Life” for Random House, an imprint of Bertelsmann SE’s Penguin Random House. “Merlin wanted you to think like a fungus, and he delivered.”

Literary fans of the title include Margaret Atwood, who tweeted her appreciation while offering words of hope for future generations. “Despair of the future of life on earth? Never mind, there will be fungus among us. One way or another.”

Ms. Atwood says she has always been interested in mushrooms. She wrote an essay about mushrooms in high school, she says, and has written several poems about them including “September Mushrooms,” which appears in “Dearly,” her most recent book of poetry (2020). She also writes about mushrooms in her “MaddAddam” trilogy of novels. “They seem so unlikely,” she says.

Sales of “Entangled Life” have proved a steady build. Nineteen months after the hardcover was published in May 2020, the paperback edition hit the

New York Times

nonfiction list dated Dec. 12, 2021. “That never happens,” says Ms. Redmon.

Readers bought about 220,000 print books related to mushrooms across the categories of nature, life sciences, and mind, body and spirit this year through Aug. 13, according to book tracker NPD BookScan, a decline of about 9% from a high point in 2021, but an increase of 56% over 2019.

Helping spur interest have been the recent docuseries “How to Change Your Mind” hosted by author Michael Pollan and based on his 2018 book “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence,” and the documentary “Fantastic Fungi” directed by Louie Schwartzberg, says Kristen McLean, an NPD book analyst.

“Mushrooms are definitely having a moment,” she says.

Mushroom enthusiasts like Jane Mason, a 55-year-old children’s book writer, have long known the fungus fun that others are just now discovering. She spent a recent Sunday in late July foraging for burn morels in a forest near Eagle, Colo.

She estimates she’s taken home 120 pounds this year, stuffing the large ones with beet greens, onions and cheese and pan frying them on both sides. A forest fire last summer—combined with a “very wet summer” this year—has led to a bumper crop, she says.

Ms. Mason was born in northern Minnesota, where she still forages for chicken of the woods, lion’s mane and lobster mushrooms in the hardwood forests. She later lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she searched for chanterelles, candy caps, black trumpets and cauliflower mushrooms.

Alan D’Souza, a 52-year-old librarian at the City College of San Francisco, says he has stored enough foraged mushrooms in his home to survive Armageddon. “The best first question probably shouldn’t be, ‘Can I eat that?’ ” he says, “but it helps us engage with the natural world.”

Understanding the difference between a safe mushroom like a chanterelle and a poisonous species is key. “I would encourage anybody not to have fear about mushroom hunting but don’t swallow anything until you are 100% certain about what it is,” says Kristen Blizzard, who with husband Trent Blizzard co-wrote “Wild Mushrooms: A Cookbook and Foraging Guide.”

In a politically fraught period, mushroom hunting offers some much needed relief. “One thing about the mushroom community is that everyone gets along,” says Ms. Blizzard “It’s kind of like pickleball in that regard.”

Write to Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at jeffrey.trachtenberg@wsj.com