At Paris Fashion Week, one of the most visually arresting pieces came from a bizarre collaboration with a marine biologist: the creation of a dress made of millions of tiny, glowing algae—like a living rave outfit if that rave was happening on the ocean floor.
Designer Iris van Herpen and scientist Chris Bellamy created the garment from Pyrocystis lunula algae. Grown in seawater and a nutrient gel that offers a unique effect of only lighting up when the dress moves.
A genuine and bonafide “living look” comes from a process in which the collaborators set aside traditional design processes and instead cultivated rather than constructed through what sounds like an incredibly tricky process of keeping the thing alive amid fluctuating temperature, humidity, and general fiddly-ness (which probably means you can’t just lob this one in the wash).
In the world of fashion week-based one-upmanship, a dress made from living algae that glows on the gram certainly is a statement you’ll remember in a sea of beige.
