This Designer Combines Science and Art to Make Biodegradable Fashion
Scarlett Yang is an innovative award-winning designer focusing on ways to create sustainable and conscious clothing. She combines art with science and technology to create intricate biodegradable fashions that look like sculptures and futuristic creations. After graduating from Central St. Martin’s Royal College of Art in London Yang founded her own studio called Studio Scarlett Yang where she has pursued her passion for conscious clothing. Through collaborations and innovations she has been featured in several major outlets as well as exhibited at Christie’s, Rolls Royce’s Muse Art Programme, the V&A, London Design Biennale, Dutch Design Week, Design Museum Den Bosch and Tropen Museum. She has also received several awards for her revolutionary work including the LVMH Green Trail award, The Mills Sustainability award, YouFab Global Creative Award and the Dezeen award.
She has several collections that all focus on different aspects of her passion for the evolution cycles of the 'hybrid matter' and her research into innovative biomateriality and virtual materials. Her 2020 collection focuses on biodegradeable materials made from silk cocoon proteins and algae extract. The dresses she created have a glass-like appearance and are able to be formed into these amazing structures. They can biodegrade in 24 hours when submerged in water. This amazing innovation hints at the future of sustainable fashion where one day consumers could purchase items and then biodegrade them quickly to be made into something completely new without leaving any waste. This is what Yang calls lifecycle design which is a very intriguing concept for the future of fashion that could accommodate trends without being wasteful. She also uses 3D technology to generate predict and fabricate her experimental models in the lab.
She also works with digital design in the metaverse. Her most recent collection is called Ephemeral Materiality and explores virtual skins. According to her website, “The interactive digital work explores the innovative possibilities of using data of nature to interpret using data of nature to interpret novel applications of new materials.” At the intersection of fashion, technology, and biology there is no telling what innovative creation this designer will come up with next!