Tiffany O'Callaghan, CultureLab editor
From dissolving dresses to blue jeans that suck nitrogen oxide from the air, Helen Storey's designs are meant to be sustainable
SHE used to design titillating ensembles for Madonna. Now, more than two decades later, Helen Storey has swapped celebrity for sustainability and abandoned the runway for the lab. She designs radical garments - such as dresses that dissolve in water - to question our throwaway society. Her latest project treats jeans with a catalyst to improve air quality.
Sixteen years ago, Helen closed her high fashion shop after personal and financial problems. As the tale goes, it was a single curving question mark that ushered her into the world of science. Her sister, Kate, an embryologist funded by the Wellcome Trust, saw a flyer about a trust initiative to get scientists and artists working side by side.
"I was more bookish and perhaps more academic. Helen went down an art route. It asked us to bring those worlds together," explains Kate, now head of the division of cell and developmental biology at the University of Dundee, UK. She sent the flyer to Helen, tacking on a note with a lone question mark.
Initially, Helen was reluctant. She had attended a school where the threat of violence hung over academic achievement and was worried that this project could bring back her long-standing educational fears. But the desire for a new direction won out.
The sisters focused on designing dresses depicting and celebrating the first 1000 hours of human development. Oddly, they found themselves swapping roles. "Helen was very anxious about getting the science right, and I was concerned that these things were beautiful, otherwise no one would look at them," Kate says.
Entitled Primitive Streak, after the groove-like structure through which cells pour to form the inner layers of the embryo, the collection of 27 dresses mixed realism and fantasy to produce such designs as 1000 Sperm Coat and Chromosome Kimono. The collection has toured seven countries since 1997. This year Helen added The Lung Dress - a graceful garment with gauzy spans of off-white filigree that rise up and away like wings.
After Primitive Streak, scientific curiosity took her in unexpected directions - and she finally shed her discomfort with academia. "I began to get used to picking up the phone and saying, 'Hello, you don't know me, but can you make me a so-and-so,' and not being fazed by silence or laughter."
One project, commissioned by Unilever to explore ideas inspired by its products, took Helen into supermarkets to stare at packets and bottles. She had been reading The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene, and was captivated by quantum entanglement - the idea that two particles can be inextricably linked no matter the distance between them.
The two things came together and, out of the blue, she called Tony Ryan, a chemist specialising in polymer nanotechnology at the University of Sheffield in the UK. After chatting for a while, she asked: "If two particles can talk to each other across the universe, why can't a bottle have a conversation with its contents and know when to disappear?"
"I didn't laugh," Ryan says, (though he did run down the corridor to tell colleagues). He found her unfettered thinking refreshing. "You get things from so far left field that you know you'd never get from a scientist."
Ryan figured out that it was indeed possible for a bottle to turn into something else, and the Wonderland project was born. The successful prototype was made of a water-soluble polymer. The plan was to fill a bowl with boiling water and dissolve the used bottle into a gel. In the cap, they intended to include seeds to grow a new plant out of the gel. Sadly, you won't be growing basil from an old bottle any time soon. Because their bottle looks like the polyethylene terephthalate used to make most plastic products, careless disposal could contaminate recycling.
Before the bottle project took off, the idea inspired art in the form of dissolving dresses. Ryan created a dissolving polymer that could be woven into a fabric and Helen designed the dresses. In exhibitions at the London College of Fashion - where she is now professor of fashion and science - and elsewhere, she dissolved the garments in giant bowls of water.
Thinking about alternative uses for clothing has led to their latest project. Manufacturers have long used nanoparticles of titanium dioxide in products from paint to cement to improve air quality. TiO2 is a photocatalytic compound, reacting to sunlight to turn harmful nitrogen oxide gases into harmless nitrates that can be washed away. Where TiO2 has been used on roads and buildings, NOx levels have been cut by as much as 60 per cent.
Ryan reasoned that on walls and roads, the impact of the paint is limited by surface area. What if we used the surface area of our clothes? "To a chemist, you're a perambulating catalyst support!" Ryan estimates that the surface area of clothes is about 40 square metres per kilogram.
The paint removes about 0.5 grams of nitrogen oxide per square metre per day, so if the clothes were as effective as paint, 1 kg of clothes could take out 20 g, with a pair of jeans taking 10 g. To cut 3 tonnes per day - roughly the amount needed to lower NOx to optimal levels in Sheffield - you would need some 3o0,000 people walking around in treated jeans, says Ryan.
He and Helen got a grant for Catalytic Clothing, treated their own jeans with TiO2 and set up installations of treated trousers in city centres - propped up like scarecrows' legs plodding across the grass. Nanoparticle provider Cristal Global is now working on a TiO2-based laundry product with cleaning supplies firm Ecover.
Today, conveying the wonder of science and having a tangible impact with her art are Helen's main motivations. Yet Kate also sees the gains for researchers who collaborate with her: "You take years to train to the point where you ask the cutting edge scientific question and perhaps only a few of your colleagues know how close you are to something novel and exciting. It's very nice to find ways to share that - someone like Helen can bring that to the fore."
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