In 1982 Ugo La Pietra designed a chair covered in a visually striking iridescent fabric. Yet contemporary designers may be turning somewhere else to create their iridescent effects.
Graduates of the MA Biodesign course at London's Central Saint Martins, for example, tried looking for alternative sources to come up with original shades and colours: Célina Camboni is a biocouturier specialising in luxury and fashion management. Her passion for a greener fashion industry prompted Camboni to look for sustainable colour effects.
The result of her research is "Emotional Iridescence: A Living Colour", her graduation biocouture research project in which she developed a bio-based iridescent coating.
The wings of the Morpho butterfly were the starting point for the research that led her to create a bio-film that mimics the natural phenomenon of iridescence in nature, made of more than 95% natural and renewable materials.
The coating is indeed made with an innovative nanofabrication process that uses the most abundant biopolymer on earth - cellulose. Unlike most traditional dyeing processes, the coating does not require large amounts of water and does not use any chemical pigments, allowing it to resist fading over time.
Camboni applied the bio-iridescent film to deadstock recycled fabrics to show how we can reduce waste and, at the same time, create a sustainable and innovative coating that has also got a physical and emotional value since it induces positive chemical reactions in our mind, body and soul.
One of the pieces Camboni made for her end of the year project is a voluminous coat as fluffy as as a fur one, but made with offcuts from old collections coated in her bio-iridescent film and sewn with recycled thread and waste materials. These experiments proved to the young designer that the process is scalable and compatible with many different textiles.
Another graduate, Marthe Frenod, also looked at luminescent materials with her "Realighty: Waterborne Bioluminescence" project, inspired by a research on the toxins and pollutants released by the textile industry into global aquatic ecosystems.
Frenod wondered what would happen it the pollution produced by fast fashion existed on our clothes and entered our skin and, using a water atlas generated pattern to give visibility to toxins and pollutants existing in universal water steams, she created a silk organza garment that raises awareness about global hygiene.
The design features patterns generated by bacterial growth: the Vibrio Harveyi bacteria - capable of emitting bioluminescence when the microorganisms are disturbed - were cultivated in the laboratory (Frenod carried out her researches at the École Nationale Supérieure Des Arts Et Industries Textiles - Université de Lille, and at the GEPEA (UMR CNRS 6144) laboratory in Saint-Nazare) and then screen printed with ecological fluorescent dyes.
It is exciting to see young designers focusing on sustainable projects that can improve the fashion industry, or have a real impact on our lives. Hopefully, these graduates will take their researches further and influence the fashion industry in a positive way with their findings. The projects are on display at London's Central Saint Martins until today as part of the "Particulate Flows" MA Biodesign Degree Show.
Comments