In yesterday's post we looked at the latest Haute Couture collection by Iris van Herpen, focusing on a gown made with a neoprene composite created for world-champion skydiver Domitille Kiger. In that post we also highlighted the difficulties the designer went through to create a gown for Kiger that could resist the force of the elements.
But there are other figures in the fashion industry who study materials and their deterioration in specific conditions – museum conservators.
The Costume Institute at the Met Museum in New York recently posted an image on its Instagram page that made you think about this issue.
The picture in question showed an ensemble by Maison Margiela's Haute Couture A/W 2018 collection by John Galliano. The designer often employed in the collections he created for Margiela pieces with synthetic and plastic-based materials.
Margiela's overdress included in the Costume Institute archive is made of polyurethane foam, a material that can easily get damaged and prematurely age after a few years especially in the presence of oxygen (it usually wrinkles, then cracks and finally breaks into small pieces).
To preserve the ensemble, Christopher Mazza, Assistant Conservator, placed it in a sealed package filled with argon gas as showed by the second and third image in the Instagram post (that, to be honest, look a bit disturbing as the pics call to mind a morgue and corpses on tables maybe ready for an autopsy…).
The notes accompanying this post on Instagram explain that the argon gas inside the package produces a non-reactive environment which helps preventing undesirable changes to the foam such as yellowing and loss of flexibility.
As there are quite a few contemporary designers employing very special and often synthetic materials for some of their most complex designs, maybe in future we may need more people with special qualification in textile and material conservation in museums with fashion/costume departments.
So, could chemistry for fashion conservation be a discipline to study in future? We hope so, as many students out there would certainly start focusing on chemistry with a renewed purpose if they knew it could help them one day to preserve from aging a design piece they love.