Wow. #Repost @sarahmower_ Just once,in a hundred blue moons , a completely ‘other’ thinker comes along - I met one this week at the Royal College of Art. This is work of Alice Potts, who told me “ One day, I believe we will be able to grow our own accessories on our skin.” I laughed, until she told me that the crystals on this pair of pointe shoes from the English National Ballet School are.. grown from the dancer’s sweat. “ I can do it within two hours.” Alice has invented a chemical process which accelerates the growth of salt crystals on textiles ( confidential and pending patent). She has experimented on the insoles of long-distance runners, and on Bradley Wiggins’ cycling team’s discarded jackets. For one thing: it shows who perspires most ( yep! It’s the ballerinas). For another, when she took her work to collaborate with scientists at Imperial College - they got really, really excited. Because, it turns out, these crystals contain chemical health ( and otherwise) data about what’s going on in the person’s body. “ We’ve had to keep the results confidential..but I can say, I’ve got a lot more sugar in me than a high-performance althete. Who had none.” Truly, this is a textile graduate who has leapt into a whole unimagined future of possibilities - with bio-technology, medicine, diagnostics.. I don’t know. An uncategorisable, brilliant young woman whose ability to cross boundaries between disciplines had me speechless in awe. Needless to say, the work is as beautiful as it is mind blowing. Someone big will leap on Alice soon, that’s for sure. Happily for us groundlings in the fashion sphere - Alice wants to “ Stay on the clothing side, I think.” @alicenapotts #sarahslist #rcafashion #classof2018

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