You'd think if you won a Nobel Prize in Medicine for discoveries about modern magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) you wouldn't have a lot to offer the world of fashion, but you certainly would be wrong in the case of the brains behind Nobel Textiles.
Atomic nuclei in a magnetic field rotate with a frequency dependent on the strength of the magnetic field - that's the basis of MRI - and their energy can be increased if they absorb radio waves at the same resonant frequency. When those atomic nuclei return to their original energy level, radio waves are emitted. It got the Nobel Prize in 1952 but it was only in the 1970s that Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield made advancements that allowed for the medical imaging it is commonly used for today.
In 2003 they shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work, in Professor Mansfield's case for showing how MRI signals could be mathematically analyzed, an essential development in useful imaging.
Now he also gets to ... help design clothes. Yes, you read that right.
If you're a reader here you know we firmly believe that anything can be made better through science. We'd happily spend $1000 to design and build a solar-powered lawnmower even though we can buy a used gas-powered one for 25 bucks. Science doesn't have to be practical, sometimes it can be art.
Sometimes the art can be worn.
Mansfield is the perfect guy to go off the beaten path like that. He left school at 15 to becomes a printer's assistant but decided he liked rockets so he took up physics and somehow that ended up with him getting a Nobel prize for work on a medical device that has saved millions of people from exploratory surgery. Not the most traditional career. His collaborator, fashion designer Shelley Fox, has made clothes using, among other things, Morse Code.
If you're anything like me you just read that and thought, 'What?' and then, 'I have to find out what that is all about.' There's nothing more distinctly left- and right-brained than fashion designers and Nobel prize winners in medicine but it turns out there is more common ground than is immediately evident.
Fox is the Donna Karan Professor of Fashion at Parsons The New School for Design. You've heard of Parsons, we've all heard of Parsons. It's like MIT, except for fashion. And they dress a lot better than most people at MIT.
To people outside science, it often seems a restrictive process. Not all that creative. To people outside fashion, it often seems like a free-for-all. Neither is really true. Science is all about breaking the laws of nature while successful design means knowing the rules before you can break them in a way that makes sense.
Which brings me back to Morse code.
****
Six volunteers - internal and external body fat of controlled diet and exercise.
"fat map" collection, four types of black dresses. Everyone looks better in black, even men know this. Men buy tuxedoes for no other reason than that we know simply wearing one knocks off 10 lbs. and adds $50,0000 of income. Only holding puppies has been proven to be more of a siren song to women.
