This article was taken from the January 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Brooke Roberts has always found brain scans to be beautiful -- so she decided to wear them.
The London-based radiographer-turned-designer takes CT and MRI scans from friends and turns them into science-inspired womenswear.
Roberts, 39, assigns every pixel in a scan to a stitch using design software. A 1,000-needle Stoll digital knitting machine follows the pattern in merino wool and man-made yarn. The first time she tried it, Roberts spent two days assigning stitches before realising the scan resolution was too high -- the finished product would have been 10m wide. "I wasn't familiar with programming," she says. "But I'm an experimenter."
Roberts also combines the scanned prints with other visual references (for her spring/summer 2015 collection, 8-bit video games and comic-book icon Tank Girl), and often seeks inspiration in unusual anatomy found in public resources, such as the Allen Institute's Brain Atlas (Paul Allen, Microsoft's cofounder, is a fan). "Sometimes you get interesting orthopaedic presentations," she says. "But for the most part I like soft tissues." A cardiac radiography specialist by day, she plans on experimenting with the "sprawling, filament-like" textures of the heart, and she has bookmarked a particular brain scan that looks like Gene Simmons's KISS makeup.
Not every body part lends itself to fashion, however. "The abdomen," she says with a shudder. "[Scanned], it's loopy and bulbous. I think it's partly understanding it that's the problem. A designer friend thought it looked like clouds. I just see the barium."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
