Tag: TEXTILES

The Web is teeming with the unrealized ideas of both students and established designers who set out to produce astonishing renderings and prototypes for unusual products. Unfortunately, due to the lack of time, money, or technology, many of those products never progress from the planning stages to the mass market. But that doesn't mean we can't salivate over them, nevertheless. In 1855, ...

By incorporating boron carbide, the third hardest material on Earth, into cotton t-shirts, scientists may have discovered a new way to create tough, durable and flexible body armor that would change the way soldiers protect themselves on the battlefield. According to Popular Science, the research team, composed of scientists from the U.S., China and Switzerland, soaked some cotton t-shirts in a ...

Jim Drain is not a fashion designer. He is an artist, who, over the past umpteen years, has created highly patterned, Huichol-inspired, frequently knitted abstract sculpture that sort of looks like the lovechild of Claes Oldenburg, Mike Kelley, and Nick Cave (the artist) with a hint of Makin Jan Ma. But for New York's gallery-cum-boutique Opening Ceremony, Drain has taken his obsession with knits ...

Feeling a need to literally show your love, as opposed to just texting sweet nothings to a special someone? What if you could turn your kind words into a warm blanket of affection in which a cherished person could wrap themselves? Sounds like romantic talk, but this is actually the notion behind Distance Lab's newest experiment in communications. Earlier this summer, the Scotland-based research ...

Could this mean the end of laundry day? Textile scientists in Australia and Hong Kong have developed a special coating for fabrics made of titanium dioxide nanoparticles that actually cause the fabric to self-clean when exposed to sunlight. Besides the obvious benefit of less time spent doing laundry, the new fabric could also mean less water used to wash clothes and less detergent being washed ...