This is the ultimate in disposable fashion. A symbol of our throwaway society - not to mention the stuff of male fantasies.
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| The dress has flowers that ‘behave like animals’ in water |
But, to the professors who designed this disappearing dress, it is a profound artistic statement about how plastics can be made to be kinder to our polluted planet.
Here is the world’s first dissolvable dress, the culmination of a creative partnership at the University of Sheffield between the award-winning designer Prof Helen Storey and Prof Tony Ryan, a leading chemist, to show off new materials that can make consumer products less environmentally harmful.
Prof Storey has worked with the University of Ulster to develop a series of innovative dissolving textiles based on polymers created in collaboration with the Sheffield Polymer Centre.
During a forthcoming exhibition, up to eight dresses made from these textiles - minus their wearers - will be lowered into enormous goldfish bowls where they will be left to liquefy.
The fabric is knitted from a clear polymer - polyvinyl alcohol - of the kind used in sachets that release detergent in washing machines. The dresses will dissolve and turn into a form that can be recycled as a bottle.
However, they break down so slowly that they can survive a sweaty party.
“The dresses Helen has created are a metaphor for the beautiful things we create and use but never really think about and just throw away,” said Prof Ryan.
“In your lifetime you throw away around 20 tons of packaging material. We want people to think about that. But it has made us think more seriously about science, too.”
The dresses are decorated with cleverly designed flowers that slowly give off a dye when they dissolve, making them move around like sea anemones in the huge goldfish bowl.
“Each dress will behave differently,” said Prof Storey. “These flowers will chase each other around the bowl in a biological way.” The dyes set up massive differences in surface tension - the forces that make the water’s “skin”.
“If you have a star shape, they appear to dance,” said Prof Ryan. And if one flower has a positively charged dye (called a cationic dye by chemists) it will stick to another with a negatively charged (anionic) dye. “They will behave like animals.”
As a result, said Prof Storey, there will be “something extraordinary” to see in the giant bowls “as the dresses dissolve, chemically react and explode as they are lowered deeper into the bowls - and will no longer exist when the exhibition closes”.
Wonderland, the umbrella project through which these new inventions are being developed, will stage an exhibition in Sheffield this autumn to provoke a debate on our throwaway society, backed by the Government’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
“The idea is to get people curious about something that is hard to talk about and not glamorous - how to get rid of your waste responsibly,” said Prof Storey.
The designer was inspired to contact Prof Ryan when he appeared on BBC radio to explain how plastics can self-destruct, and she has worked with him to merge art and science in other products.
They have made bottles that, once empty, can be dissolved in hot water - when the solution cools down it makes a gel that can be used to grow seeds into flowers. Another product is a water purification pillow.
The potential of dissolving dress polymers is enormous, both for the environment and humanitarian development, said Prof Ryan.
“This isn’t about boring labs and test-tubes,” he said. “It’s about turning ideas into reality.”
TAGS: dissolvable, dress, dye, plastic, polymer
posted by : regine on 20 Jan 2007
