Researchers embrace fashion to show off science concepts

Abstract

When fashion designers, retailers, and families attend Vancouver Kids Fashion Week, they expect to see models donning the latest in children’s fashion. But at an event last October, attendees saw scientists as well. Researchers from Michael Kobor’s lab at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, had set up a booth to showcase some of the model organisms they study. The fashion twist: Those model organisms later appeared on the runway, on a line of outfits created by fashion designers. Mechanical engineer Angela Chang and designer Harry Umen came together to create the “Luminous Firefly Dress,” aiming to evoke ideas about how body gesture, light, color, and sound enhance personal expression. Image credit: Howard Eglowstein (photographer). The collaboration between the Kobor lab and the fashion school at Vancouver Community College in British Columbia, Canada, started several months earlier. The researchers were desperate for ways to share their work with a new audience. Some lab members work on human genetics and epidemiology; others on basic research using animal models. The intricacies of the latter research, they found, weren’t easy to share with the general public. “The model organism research is just as important, but not as visible,” says graduate student Samantha Schaffner, who studies the epigenetics of Parkinson’s disease. Schaffner and her colleagues started brainstorming ways to introduce these model organisms to a wider audience and quickly landed on the idea of a collaboration with a group outside of science. Initially, Schaffner and her team considered a wide range of art collaborators, from illustrators to jewelry designers. But Schaffner remembered another creative field from her childhood: Her mother managed a children’s clothing line, working with fashion designers to create hats called “Sam’s Tams.” Imagining the possibilities of colorful and eye-catching model organism-themed fashion, Schaffner suggested the lab contact the fashion …