Who is Richard Weston? He’s a man of the times.
In the 21st century, lines between technology and art are becoming more and more blurred each day, forming fashion tendencies of its own.
Here at SheBytes, we’ve already followed a number of fashion creations produced by high end fashion houses, specifically created to accommodate your phones, laptops, tablets and many more of your everyday gadgets.
Normally, fashion items of that sort are created in collaborations between tech companies and major fashion designers of the likes of Chanel, Dior, Lois Vuitton. However, in an interesting twist; a fresh high-end fashion innovation came to us from an unexpected place in the shape of a middle-aged professor of architecture at Cardiff University; Richard Weston.
After years of life dedicated to his passion for architecture, nature, and research within the field, Richard Weston was branded as “fashion’s most unexpected new design star’ by British magazine Vogue. With his latest silk scarf collection being featured in Vogue, The Independent, and BBC 2’s “Britain’s Next Big thing”, a renowned architect, author and a professor is the next designer to watch.
After many years as a university professor, Richard Weston began his career in fashion by creating the world’s largest collection of magnified scanned images of the internal structure of rocks, fossils, and minerals (nerdy but pretty cool).
Gathering items for inspiration is usually considered a normal process for most designers, but Weston took things a little further by using by-products of mining and other operations near his home in Cardiff to actually create astonishing images that are then transferred onto fabric. Then, they’re finally transformed into part of a top selling scarves collection at Liberty London!
The production process begins with polishing and cleaning his new found specimens in order for the images to come out perfect. Images are “drawn by light” , while using digital scanners instead of cameras. The most beautiful part of the process is that no two objects are alike, and no two images of the same object are identical. There is no way to predict how a certain image will come out, so hundreds are being taken in order to produce the highest quality result.
This process yielded a beautiful silk fabric collection, that was later made into a high-end clothes and scarf collection, which received a “Welsh Design Award for Fashion and Textiles” in 2010. These breathtaking scarves are manufactured and printed in Italy using the world’s best digital silk printers.
Weston’s latest silk scarf collection can be purchase here at Net-A-Porter. With a price tag of $285 each, pricey one might say, but can one really put a price on science-couture?
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