What will we be wearing in the future?

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You're listening to the podcast of BBC Inside Science, first broadcast on Thursday, the 14th of August, 2025.

It was first recorded at the Cheltenham Science Festival.

Hello and welcome to Radio 4's Inside Science.

I'm Marnie Chesterton coming to you in front of a live studio audience here at Cheltenham Science Festival.

Okay, so now we've bonded, I'm going to cut to the chase.

Can you all take your clothes off?

Can we get the lights up?

Bear with me, literally.

Yep, they're definitely doing that, radio audience.

The reason I'm asking is what I actually want you to do is have a look at the labels in your clothes.

If you know the person next to you with mutual consent, you can check each other's.

But what I want to know is

this is good, there's some definite checking going on.

Once you know, hold on to that information

and

I will come back to that in a bit.

Because I ought to explain that this week's Inside Science is all about unraveling the science lurking in our wardrobes and laundry baskets.

And here to help make sense of fashion is a panel of style icons.

Mark Miyadovnik is a professor of materials and society at University College London and director of the UCL Institute of Making.

We've got Dr.

Anna Pochaiski, who's a materials scientist, podcaster, and author of Handmade: A Scientist's Search for Meaning Through Making.

And we've got Dr.

Jane Wood, a lecturer in textile and fashion technology, part of the Department of Materials at the University of Manchester.

And before she worked there, she spent more than 15 years, right, Jane, in the textiles industry.

And I think you've made everything from parachutes, car airbags, children's pajamas, and jeans.

And everything else in between.

Okay, big round of applause to our panel.

So, radio listeners, at this point, you'll be pleased to know that our audience has entirely disrobed and they are sitting with their clothes labels neatly packed in front of them.

So, show of hands.

Let's start with an easy one.

Who's wearing something made of cotton?

Okay, that's most of you.

What about elastane?

A couple of, a handful of elastains.

Wool.

There we go, we've got about a dozen.

No, more than that.

A good tweedy turnout.

Excellent.

Have we got anything else?

Has anyone got anything unusual?

Yes, sir.

Bamboo.

Bamboo.

Yes, I've got my bamboo socks on.

Anything else?

Polyester.

Polyester, yes.

Now we've got two materials scientists on the panel.

Mark, for most of us, the word material means fabric, but for a materials scientist, actually, it's everything, right?

Does that give you an expanded view of what fabrics could be?

I'm excited about fabrics, I'm excited about metals and glasses and

everything.

I think the lens in which I look at it is always about zooming into the microstructure and into the nanostructure and the atomic structure.

So you're always on a journey to inner space.

And I can give you a demo of that.

Yeah, I was going to say,

should we do that?

Should we use Anna as our guinea pig?

So one of the things we do as material scientists is we take microscopes, and this is an optical one, but basically it means that you can kind of zoom into a material.

So in the case of this linen suit, you can see the weave.

So for the audience at home, Mark has

a little microscope that plugs into the laptop, which we're showing to the audience.

And so if I I can, Anna, I can zoom into your sock.

Okay.

This is elastain in action.

And we can see why your socks stay up because see how there are two fibers interwoven in each other?

Okay, so they're twisted around like a, it still looks like a rope.

So that's a wool sock, right?

Or is it a thick cotton?

A thick cotton sock with an elastain.

There, those are the elastane fibers there.

Oh, wow.

And so this is the fascination.

So once you get the bug, like everything is made of these tiny structures all nested inside each other.

We, as humans, have kind of manipulated them to get the properties you want.

You want something stretchy, you have to look at the structure and change it.

You want something comfortable, you have to look at the structure and change it.

And of course, fabrics then are of course a brilliant subject for study.

Panel, I asked you to dress to impress, and you didn't let me down.

At the risk of sounding pervy, Anna,

what are you wearing?

Well, I didn't get naked alongside the rest of the room.

This is a jumper that I knitted myself.

It took me about a year to make.

It's what is called a cable-knit jumper.

You can probably picture that.

Yeah, lots of different weaves and different techniques gone into making it.

And Mark, if you want to give us a twirl.

Yes.

I'm wearing a white suit.

Homage to the man in the white suit, the 1950s classic Ealing comedy with Alec Guinness.

Who here has seen that film?

Yes,

it's as relevant today as it was then, and it's all about how someone, a material scientist, yes, they were there in the 1950s, create a material that couldn't be broken and always cleaned itself.

You never needed to clean it.

So you'd only ever have to have one suit in your life and you wouldn't have any other clothes.

And the person who makes this white suit, he thinks everyone is going to just think he's brilliant for doing this.

And the exact opposite happens.

And finally, Jane.

So I'm wearing a jacket.

I wove the fabric myself

with the aid of some very other talented people.

I hasten to add.

A panel of this jacket is actually made from kombucha leather.

When you say kombucha,

do you mean like the sort of plug of bacteria in the bottom of the jar?

Yeah, so if you brew kombucha tea, you normally brew it for about three days.

So you brew green tea and sugar, and the bacteria ferments and you get that acidy taste of the drink.

If you leave it to brew for about three weeks, maybe you get a film on the top.

You can harvest that film, rinse it just with water, and then dry it out, and you get something that's very leather-like.

If you just grow it, just use it as is.

What we know about it is it's extremely biodegradable.

So you put that in your compost bin within two weeks, there's nothing left, it's disappeared.

This jacket, I've had this for at least 10 years, and this hasn't biodegraded.

It's starting to go a little bit.

But one of the things we know about this is it loves moisture.

I've travelled down from Manchester today.

If I wore a jacket like this in Manchester, we all know what Manchester is like, it wouldn't be on me for very long.

So it is susceptible to moisture, but we also know it is extremely abrasion resistant.

We found that it's more abrasion-resistant than motorcycle leathers.

So that's a really interesting use for it.

That maybe we need to think about these new fabrics in a way: okay, well, is it a replacement for some of the things that we have, or can we use it in a different way?

Can we think of a different way of using it?

So, just to check, it's strong, but if you wear it clubbing and you get sweaty, it dissolves.

It changes.

So, there you go, it's a piece of clothing that changes as you wear it, depending on how you feel.

Changes from clothing into gel,

which some people call my favorite-like, very figure-hugging.

Whilst we're doing uh comparing uh substances, can I show you my uh eel skin?

I feel a bit bad about this because I do genuinely love eels and they're on the critical endangered list now.

But I bought this before they were put on the red list, and also it's a by-product of the eel fishing industry.

Surprisingly, not slimy.

Oh, wow, you can see what are the lines on here?

Like the dots?

That's the backbone.

That's a little bit.

Well, that's the top.

That's the top of the eel.

So it's just.

Yeah.

And a fish skin.

Could that be a future fabric?

Well, I think whenever we look at sort of the natural world and the materials that the natural world makes, you know, they've been evolved for millions of years for a very specific purpose.

For fish, it's about reducing drag against the water, right, and presumably being waterproof and all that kind of thing.

So if we were going to use fish skin, I'd probably say swimming costumes biomimicked amazing swimming costumes.

You know, evolution did it first, why not copy?

Very much.

I think so, yeah.

I was just going going to say that if anybody's heard of fast skin, so that was the swimming costume that was used in the Olympics.

It was banned, wasn't it, eventually?

But that was a beautiful piece of biomimicry from fish skin, actually, shark skin.

Yeah, beautiful.

Globally, putting clothes on our backs is a trillion-dollar industry.

And Jane, even in the UK, it's billions, right?

This is it's big, it's important, and could we be doing it better?

Much, much better.

I think one of the common misconceptions with fashion, when we say the word fashion, a lot of people think, Okay, well, I'm nothing to do with fashion, I'm not a fashionable person, but fashion is clothing, and we all wear clothing, and it's a type of communication.

And one of the big things that happens when people say fashion is that people start to think, Okay, well, that's very aesthetic, that's catwalk, that's designers,

but it's science as well.

It's really exciting, incredible science.

All of the clothes that we've got in the room today are not because they're all still naked.

Oh, obviously, yeah.

Um, looking good, audience, by the way.

All of that has a lot of science in it.

So, the colour, the types of fabrics, the way they perform, the types of fabrics that you think, well, I could wear that against my skin, but then if you've got a raincoat, you probably wouldn't want to wear that fabric as a pair of pants.

So, all the different science that goes into all those different fabrics is amazing.

And I think fashion and clothing is a really good contextualization of things like chemistry and physics and biology and all of those sciences that we have in our heads as very traditional science.

Clothing and textiles are just a fantastic manifestation of all of those things.

All the science in the world, but to get it to be cheap, you have to mass produce them.

And the mass production is, well, it's both labour, which has its own problems in countries, but it's also these incredible.

If you ever visit these places, you just see these incredible machines weaving them things at breakneck speed.

It's just marvellous, marvellous to see.

Talking of machines, Mark, I believe you have a machine that could 3D print me a perfectly fitting bespoke outfit that I can, after this show, wear out to science-themed clubbing, and then, when I roll in in the wee small hours, rather than putting it in the laundry bin, put it in the compost.

Yes, that is definitely possible.

And we can't print the whole thing for you with our machines, but people have in the fashion industry taken the the same technology that we're using in the lab and done that, printed a whole outfit for someone.

And it exactly fits them, because the thing about 3D printing is that you take a digital file, so we would scan you, Moni, and we would design something digitally on a screen.

And the way it becomes a fabric is not that there are fibers in it, but there are small chainmail links.

And I've got some here.

So you can 3D print.

from a digital file and the way that works is it prints one layer at a time and just keeps building up the material.

But this is is a fabric, you can see it's draping, but it's made of nylon in this case.

Is that sort of a scaled-up version, or would I be wearing that?

You would be wearing that.

So, actually, getting this to the kind of comfort levels, and therefore the small-scale chain is still not where we're at.

Without handing it over, the thing is, you can functionally grade it.

So, you can make bits of the outfit stiff.

So, look, that bit is completely stiff, it's just a ledge.

And then you can make bits that drape.

Oh, that is clever.

And there are no joints.

This is made in one piece.

So this is one joint.

So you can do things that you can't do very easily.

There's 3D knitting too, but it's really pushing the boundaries of what we think of as a fabric and what we think of as fashion.

And the cool thing about this technology is you can then put other stuff in there.

So what we are doing is putting sensors into that material so that when you move, it will sense what you've moved, which are your arm or how much you've moved.

And also, we're working on trying to help people who have impairments.

So, if they can't move their arm very well, we can put actuators inside it which will help them move their limbs.

It's not so much to replace everyday wear, but it's more like this is a technology that really can help people who are motion impaired.

So, that people who don't move enough.

Well, if you can't get up off a chair easily without a, you know, we could design you a fabric which will tense around your muscles and give you support at that moment and then relax and allow you to walk normally.

And you can just wear that as a a fabric so you don't have to have a walking stick and therefore feel socially that or psychologically that you know it's it's you know, but also it just helps people be more mobile because that's one of the key determiners of health is as you get older is that you keep mobile.

Is this a really sophisticated version of Wallace and Gromit's wrong trousers?

Yes.

Wilson.

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Can I share share these with the audience?

Oh, sure, yeah, absolutely.

Is that all right?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Right.

There we go.

Passing that around.

Would you like to wear an outfit made of that?

It's a little bit translucent for me.

Yeah, like I say, clubber wear, you know.

From a healthcare perspective, of course, one of the issues is that everyone's different size and shape.

In this technology, it doesn't really matter what shape you are because you get scanned and it will print it to exactly your shape.

So everything will be bespoke and it doesn't cost you any more.

I mean, it costs you a lot,

but it's not like everyone, all the different shapes and sizes.

And that's what the technology is really good at.

Speaking of someone whose clothes have never fitted properly, how expensive are we talking?

I think at this point in the technology it's very hard.

It's only been kind of demonstrated in very high-end kind of exhibition style.

So I don't think there's a a real price you could put on it at the moment.

And the thing about price, anyway, is it's all about automation.

The mass production of clothes is what has really brought the price down, and the mass production of crops, and the mass production of all of that stuff.

And this is not a mass production technology, this is always going to be a bespoke technology.

So, the time it takes for the machine to actually print it is tens of hours.

But does that mean in the evening, if we all had our own 3D printer instead of a wardrobe full of clothes, you could scan yourself and start the printer, it could wear overnight while you sleep, and then you could have your outfit in the morning.

I mean, the stuff that we're passing around now, which is not functional in the sense that it's drapes and you can make a garment out of it, that you could do at home if you had a printer and you could just make your own and print them and wear them.

Because you can make biodegradable polymers, and then you could take it to a high-temperature industrial compost and it would be eaten by bacteria.

The really exciting thing about this approach is there's no waste.

When you make traditional garments in the traditional way, there are huge amounts of waste because we generally cut out the pieces of the garment and stitch them together, and then we have all these bits of fabric left over that go to landfill.

So, this sort of technology around scanning or growing fabric or 3D printing it or whatever we think of, that's amazing.

So, Jane, we've talked about your kombucha leather coat.

I'm just wondering what else microbiology has created in the fabric scene.

There's lots of really exciting things, and really, in microbiology at the moment, we're looking more at biofilms.

So, this is what the kombucha leather is: it's a biofilm that has developed on the surface of some liquid.

So, that's looking at microbial activity.

There is quite a lot of work looking at microbes that can develop colour.

So, we're thinking about different ways in which we can dye our textiles in a bit more of an eco-friendly way.

We started off talking about Elastane.

I've recently met somebody who is actually making a seaweed version of Elastane.

So they're taking fiber from seaweed and then making that into Elastane, which is just amazing.

And a lot of the technology is looking at how we can be more environmentally responsible to not produce waste and produce things that we can easily dispose of.

If you think about fast fashion and what fast fashion is made of, it's predominantly polyester.

Polyester, we know, lasts for a very, very, very long time, which blows my mind.

Why would you make something that you only want to wear a few times and it's going to go out of fashion really quickly out of something that lasts forever?

I guess because when you buy it, you're like, oh, this isn't, you know, this is durable.

Durable is good, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, I guess it's this tension, isn't it, between the decisions that we make about longevity and temporariness.

And we should be thinking of it more in terms of longevity, definitely.

I think one of the big problems that we have in the textile industry, and maybe from a material science point of view, is that sometimes we act in isolation.

So we can create these really fabulously clever fabrics in a lab, but nobody ever wants to wear them because they look a bit rubbish

because we've ignored designers.

And if we all work together and we make something that's really clever but also really beautiful, then we've cracked it, haven't we?

There is another bit of the puzzle, which is that they always have to be then washed and cared for in the home.

And often, anything that's going to go in the washing machine or

just have to be cleaned by something in some reform starts to destroy that structure.

Producing a structure, however clever, that then can over time still be doing its thing ten years later is a really hard problem to solve.

What I'm hearing is don't wash your clothes so much.

Yeah, there's that.

Which

I'm here for.

Someone told me once that your jeans aren't supposed to be washed.

Is that true since I've got you?

I think that's a teenager who says that.

Oh, well, well, that's a real compliment because I've got a pair of jeans and I've never washed them in another for years.

On that note, just a reminder: this is Inside Science coming from the Cheltenham Science Festival.

I'm Marnie Chesterton, and with me are a panel: Dr.

Jane Wood, Dr.

Anna Poschaiski, and Professor Mark Miadovnik.

And we're talking about the science of fashion.

Are we thinking enough outside of the box?

Because we do need clothes, right?

And we do also need to support the clothing industry, industry, which is big business in the UK.

So,

what's the solution, Jane?

That is a million-dollar question, isn't it?

Billion, billion-dollar question, well, billion-dollar question.

I think what's really interesting, this it always comes back in my mind that not so very long ago, you would go to the supermarket and you would get 20 plastic carrier bags, no problem.

And then suddenly, we have this five pence tax.

Five pence is nothing.

So, maybe it's something like that with clothing.

You don't want to buy another carrier bag because you know you've got 20 at home, so I don't need another one.

If we had that mindset with clothing, that would be an absolute game changer.

But we're not paying the full price when we buy the clothes.

I mean, we all know that, right?

So you buy a five-pound or six-pound t-shirt or a pair of leggings, but that's not the price that it really costs the earth.

Because if it's cotton, it will have had loads of pesticides and fertilizer applied to the field.

And the local population have to deal with the aftermath of that.

The oceans, the water systems.

Then there's all these dyeing processes, and then the synthetic polymers are similar.

There's lots of CO2 emissions.

So, what we're doing with that price is saying, yeah, you can have it for that, but there's a whole load of harm and terrible working practices in other countries where people are working for pennies.

And we have to ask ourselves as a society, are we okay with that?

And I think at the moment we are, weirdly, to me.

We're okay with that because we're somehow in denial that a long way away and in the atmosphere and in the oceans, bad things are happening due to our consumption.

But

today I won't worry.

You know, I've got this party coming up, or I've got this particular thing, and so that's okay.

And I think at some point we've got to just realize that we're all living on one planet, there is no other planet, we have to pay the full price.

And if clothing became the real price, which in the case of a t-shirt might be £40

because it's no longer harming the planet, then you'd probably buy less.

At which point the chain mail and kombucha outfits start to make it a lot more attractive.

So I'm going to throw it over to you, audience.

Do you have any questions for our panellists?

This is to Mark.

It's a bit of a niche question, but seeing your 3D printed material was made of octahedra, can you make it out of other linked polyhedra?

Is that the best one to link because it has some sort of topological properties, or can you use other platonic solids or other polyhedra?

Yes, brilliant question.

And yes, we can.

So, anything that will interlock, you can just change the topology digitally, and you can do anything you like on that.

And we've been exploring lots of different topologies.

And you can block certain actions.

So, imagine the situation where you sprain your arm, and the clinician says, Look, you really must not move it for a week, and then after that, gentle movement.

So, imagine that we 3D print something with particular link topology that stops you moving it in one direction but allows rotation, let's say.

And then, over time, we have a small actuator in there that just relaxes that topology.

And so the material can be programmed and with different links in different places to allow you to recover efficiently.

And we're actively talking to people with different spinal injuries and back problems where this really is going to come into play.

So, yeah, it's

really exciting stuff, Mark.

Thank you.

Great question.

Okay, over here.

Just for everyday clothing, why is synthetic better than natural?

Wool, for example?

Jane,

I think there's many ways that you can look at this.

So when synthetic clothing became big business, one of the big reasons was it was cheaper to produce than cotton or wool or natural.

But the the biggest thing was it was so very easy to care for.

You didn't have to iron this clothing, you could just hang it up, you know, the the drip-dry shirt and and and that sort of thing.

So, I think it's what we mean by better.

So, in terms of ease of care, longevity of colour, some of the ways that we put colour into, say, polyester make it extremely durable in a way that we can't do with wool and cotton.

So, it can hold its colour for a lot longer.

So, it's a much more durable fibre.

We can manipulate it quite well.

Polyester is amazingly versatile, but the price that we pay for it is it's extremely polluting, it's from oil.

You know, we have all these other problems with it.

If you flip that and say, okay, well,

let's move to cotton, let's move to 100% natural fibre tomorrow, and we'll do away with synthetic.

A couple of reasons that that could never happen is

we would all have to stop living on the planet to be able to grow enough cotton to clothe us all, which is a bit of a problem in itself.

So it's a real balancing act, and one better than the other, it depends on your point of view and what the clothing is and what you want it for.

Well, Anna, I noticed that you brought in wool.

What's so great about wool for you?

I just love it so much.

Partly, it's because, as a material scientist, it speaks to me in a very deep way, particularly because I've, as a hand knitter, as a hand maker,

what you do when you make a textile from scratch, you understand the structure-property relationships, and that is like the fundamental thing that material science is: is understanding how does this, in the case of material material science, atomic structure, give rise to these properties like strength or hardness or flexibility.

With something like a knitted textile, you're seeing that, but at a scale that you can actually witness with your eyes.

So, if anyone's wearing a jumper, if you feel around the bottom of it or on the cuffs, you've got what's called a rib, which is a different structure, and that structure is stretchy because of how the fiber has been woven into itself.

So,

if you zoomed in all the way down to the atomic structure, you would find a little tiny coil of keratin.

And then if you zoomed out a little bit more, you'd see some of those wrapped around each other.

And then if you zoomed out a little bit more, you'd see some of those bunches wrapped around more bunches.

And it's this incredible hierarchical structure down to the atomic scale, all the way up to the fiber that you actually knit with.

That's a coil as well.

Like DNA, but with keratin.

Yeah, exactly.

And like loads of DNA all wrapped around each other.

We haven't yet created a synthetic textile that is as versatile and has so many different properties as does wool.

Now, we've got time for one more question.

So,

does graphite have a role in textile production manufacturing?

Manchester, Jane, you get this one who said that.

I'm not an expert on graphene, I have to admit, but I know that there's been lots of work around coating textiles and looking at electrical conductivity.

But the thing with graphene is you can get in every colour as long as it's black, and that's a problem.

So, what are our take-homes?

Now that we're all schooled in future fashions, personally for me, it's that if we want to keep the fashion industry alive without clogging up the planet's landfills, then fast fashion is okay if it's diverted to compost and/or compost and then returned to compost afterwards.

So, I'm looking forward to wearing fish skin and onions at some point in the future.

I'm also looking forward to wearing 3D printed clothing that actually fits me.

That's a great one.

And that, in conclusion, we should all be wearing tweed.

Yes?

I mean, I do recommend that in the autumn is particularly.

Yeah.

Perfect autumn.

I feel like is the spiritual fabric of Radio 4 anyway.

It's that all corduroy.

So once again, BBC Radio 4 is ahead of the curve.

That's all we've got time for.

Thank you so much to the audience today for coming in and taking your clothes off.

So give yourself a big round of applause

and keep that going for our panel.

Professor Mark Miadovnik, Dr.

Anna Paszowski and Dr.

Jane Woods.

Thanks at home for listening.

I'm Marnie Chesterton.

Bye for now.

You've been listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Marnie Chesterton.

The producers were Claire Salisbury and Lyndon Jones.

Technical production by Giles Aspen and Gail Gordon.

The show was made in Cardiff by BBC Wales and West.

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