Cosmo-SkyMed Fashion Inspirations

In a previous post I wrote about the Hubble Space Telescope, urging fashion design students to try and do their own researches among the hundreds of pictures taken by the space telescope and maybe use them as inspirations for their collections.

If you are among those fashion design students or among those readers who are into Space Age fashion who wrote to me saying they found that post inspiring, you should rejoice at last week’s launch of the fourth Italian-built (yes, there are things we Italians still do better, despite being led by a ridiculous Prime Minister…) Constellation of Small Satellites for Mediterranean Basin Observation satellite – in short COSMO-SkyMed 4 – on a Delta II rocket.

The first Delta launch took place on May 13, 1960 and the first three COSMO-SkyMed satellites were launched in June and December 2007 and October 2008.

The good news for fashion design students is that the new satellite will acquire 1,800 images of planet Earth every day.

On the Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI – Italian Space Agency) site you will find rather beautiful images taken by the previous COSMO-SkyMed satellites that I would suggest you to use as the starting points for interesting experiments in surface elaborations.

There are some absolutely fascinating pictures like those of the Rio Grande de Buba in Guinea Bissau or of the Richat Structure in the Sahara Desert near Quadane in Mauritania, that look like scars on the surface of the planet Earth and that I think would look interesting if reproduced in fabrics, leather or rubber.

When looking at these satellite images also think about different techniques to reproduce them in fashion designs such as knitting or crocheting.

Along with her sister Christine, science writer Margaret Wertheim founded the Institute for Figuring and launched a while back the Crochet Reef Project. The latter consists in recreating a coral reef in crochet using a “hyperbolic” stitch, that is crocheting at variable rates.

The project mixes marine biology, handicraft and environmental consciousness, but it also looks at how to recreate complex equations in physical space.

If you want to stick to space and the design of the universe, check out also ASI's links to its high energy astrophysics research programmes with studies on X-ray and gamma astrophysics, high energy radiations and non-baryonic matter. For further inspirations on this subject, watch the following lecture by astrophysicist George Smoot that includes some spectacularly fascinating pictures of the structure of the universe.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

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