Designer fashion

In matters of taste and aesthetics there is no more reliable arbiter than a London taxi driver. As good luck would have it, one arrived only the other day at the home of Helen Storey, the fashion designer.

"Mind if I have a look?" he said, having dropped off a package and noted the sketches for her new collection spread on the floor. "Now, that dress. Is it what I think it is? Two sperms pointing up a woman's body? Quite beautiful really."

Storey was encouraged. A yes yes vote. Recognition and appreciation, registered on the great litmus test of public opinion. Not wishing to disclose that I do not have the finely honed sensibilities, nor, indeed, the embryological nous of a cabbie, I keep quiet and peer at the bodice in question.

It looks to me rather like two inverted garden trowels clamped over a pair of breasts. I am almost sure I recently noticed Ulrika Jonsson togged out in something similar for a press launch of some new product. Underwear, I think. Or even garden trowels.

But not, I can say with some certainty, sperm. Sperm, thus far, have established no discernible niche in the fashion market. Storey is here to rectify this omission. Her collection features, among much other spermobilia, a sperm dress, a sperm cape and a sperm kimono embroidered by a Japanese craftswoman who spent 150 hours stitching wiggly shapes in translucent nylon thread.

Neither the concept nor the laboriousness of the manufacture is sufficient, you may think, to excite a Harvey Nichols buyer. That is partly the point. But to begin, as Storey has done, at the beginning.

In May this year she and her sister Kate, a developmental biologist at Oxford University, were awarded [pounds]25,000 by the Wellcome Trust's Sci-Art initiative, intended to inspire cross-fertilisation between art and science. Storey elected to design frocks representing key stages in the first 1,000 hours of human life. The resulting collection, entitled "Primitive Streak", goes on show at the ICA next month before moving, she hopes, to the Science Museum and from there to San Francisco and Australia.

So much for the facts. It was the concept I had trouble with. Even to one whose wardrobe is awash with crumpled and vilely patterned polyester, prints of squashed chromosomes and rats' DNA take a little getting used to.

Still, Storey has always been adept at producing neat solutions from unpromising beginnings. The daughter of David Storey, author of This Sporting Life, she was a patchily educated, rebellious teenager who first found work with the Italian fashion designer, Valentino, only because she was "pretty and English".

In 1989, after setting up her own business, she was named British Designer of the Year. By the early nineties she was famous for innovation and controversy. She printed foetuses on frocks as a sideswipe against Laura Ashley-style piecrust frills. She sent her models down the catwalk bare-bottomed, and the interest was such that Desmond Morris was called forth to pronounce on the cultural relevance of the buttock.

Cher and Madonna bought frocks from her. Her fashion house turned over [pounds]1 million in the year that her business partner and husband, Ron Brinkers, became ill with lymphoma.

Storey helped to nurse him through his long illness, certain that he would die as the cancer spread through his head and body. He survived. The business and the marriage collapsed. In one of the grim fables for which the industry is noted, she - one more dethroned fashion queen - ended up, a single mother of an eight-year-old son, in the signing-on queue at a Kilburn Jobcentre.

We first met shortly afterwards at her house to discuss her autobiography, Fighting Fashion. I dimly remembered a talent for simplification. White walls, no mess. So here we are again: her laying out the sketches of her collection - designed, she tells me comfortingly, with a 12-year-old's understanding of scientific principles in mind; me with a sneaky cynicism about how you get from blastocysts to shoulder pads and whether it is worth the ticket.

"That is the implantation dress," says Storey. "That is the embryo. That is the uterus wall."

Red frock, black chiffon draped over shoulder, I write obediently.

"This is dividing cells, based on how they look through a microscope. What I've done is to acid-etch fabric down to its finest threads, then overprint with flock and allow some of the bleed on top of that."

Breastplate resembling slice of watermelon, I write, but I am a bit disarmed.

The collection has the sinuous, rather beautiful look of Storey's old work. The idea - obvious enough - is that those who love fashion or art will absorb lessons in human biology. The execution is less simple.

Storey had to learn, spending hours in a lab scrutinising chick embryos in an attempt to ensure her designs were an accurate representation of the scientific process. "I had to cram up on a whole area of education I'd missed. Then I tried to translate a foreign language into a foreign medium."

Her craft team, she says, is working on materials never exploited or discovered by the fashion industry.

Thus, if fibre-optic helmets should ever become a style must-have, thank Storey. If the chainstore market goes for frocks in a material with the curious texture of undercooked poppadum, give credit to the researcher who achieved precisely this effect by hitching an ultrasound machine to an old Singer sewing machine.

Enough fabrics? You think the same effect may be achieved by sitting too close to a gas fire in a Crimplene cardi? Dear reader, as a fashion zombie I sympathise. The real point is what a breeding experiment between an embryo and a ballgown is for. Does collusion between fashion and science offer much to the genepool of either?

For a pioneer, Storey is remarkably realistic. "It divides people massively. Some scientists are almost annoyed if there's any linkage. They believe that, in making science accessible to the public, it is over-simplified. They don't like the idea of people meddling.

"Because I was working with my sister, we could fight, stand our ground and make up, but I nearly gave up halfway through. I felt I was taking visual dictation. To be accurate to the science, I was having to pass over aesthetic judgment. I rode through that and came up with things I would never have thought of.

"But I'm not sure how much other disciplines can do for describing science if the criterion is accuracy and making things provable. I think that might be where science and art divide. Art doesn't have to have a provable truth attached to it, and science does. What I've tried to do is stick to key principles while making it beautiful, and that is very difficult."

And what does fashion get from pushing back boundaries? Storey describes what she is doing as New Fashion (a neologism hitherto applicable chiefly to those in new Labour who saw fit to get out of baggy-kneed cords and eggy ties and into strict blue suiting.) Certainly old fashion is deadly dull. The verve of the sixties and the seventies has mutated into shop rails full of dull, routine clothes with little - bar a Spice Girls platform trainer - to suggest inspiration or innovation.

Storey is one of those designers who eschews personal glitter. I think she was wearing the same rubber flip-flops as when we met three years ago. Are we all going to become utilitarians now; happy to promote new fashion to art status while declining to buy clothes that bore rather than inspire? If Storey does not exactly envisage the demise of the British fashion industry, nor does she see a great future for it.

"Many designers have been stuck in a rut. They can't start drawing off the nineties yet. It's too early. But if you're in the business, you can't admit that. If you always have to do another collection, it's difficult to flow through ideas. You have to be totally commercial.

"Plus, as a medium, fashion has great restrictions on where it can go as an experiment. The British public has problems with ideas when it's something they have to wear."

Storey's experimentation was in great part enforced by bankruptcy and a failure to win in the commercial game. She does not, she says, regret her departure, apart from missing the drama of presenting a collection. "A part of me will always be attracted to the process of performance - just not to any of the rest of the crap. And that's essential if you're running a business. But what I want to do is find a use for fashion beyond flogging another dress."

If innovation in fashion is dragged down by the commercial imperative, then science - though she does not say so - is more dangerously bedevilled by a similar problem.

The only long-term answer to renewable energy is fusion, but even the current eco-frenzy does not appear to have speeded up the costly research required. Post-Einsteinian physics and the quest for the smallest particle of matter moves slowly, hampered by the cost of providing more and bigger accelerators.