Science and fashion?

One of the reasons I enjoy teaching science at an art and design school is because I believe science is such a rich source of ideas and inspiration for all forms of creative pursuits.  I've started keeping my eyes open for different (and sometimes surprising) ways that scientific concepts or imagery appear in art, design, and even fashion.

The dress below is from the Lela Rose fall 2010 collection.   When I ran across it, I read that the pattern for the fabric is inspired by Hubble Space Telescope 'images of lunar floors'. If I had to guess, I would have thought the images were from NASA space probes photographing Jupiter's moons, rather than Hubble, but what do I know?  

 




The pattern looks to me like a re-imagining of the impact craters on moons as pools of water. Jupiter's moon Callisto is known for its craters and is what the pattern resembles most in terms of actual space images:


Image from http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/target/Callisto

This gives me a random opportunity to make a plug for how cool the moons of Jupiter are.  The four moons originally observed by Galileo (helping to lead to the sun-centered model of the solar system) are shown in a NASA "family portrait" below:



Image from http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/target/Callisto

The other thing I thought about when I came across this dress was this post by one of my students to the Unstable Nucleus class blog.