Fashion with a message: fabrics, colours, design – the mathematician Sophie Skach leaves nothing to chance.
Sophie Skach’s claim to fashion is an intellectual one. With an education in technical mathematics, men’s fashion and knitwear designs, she strives to include scientific concepts in her collections. The collection for the Vienna Awards – Austria’s most important fashion gala – pays homage to Tycho Brahe (1546-1604), who, as Skach explains, was “the last astronomer without a telescope, but the first one to observe a supernova”. And he’s said to have been the only one with a silver nose. He needed it, because he lost the tip of his nose in a sword duel. Anyway, what’s more important is that Sophie Skach’s collection was one of the highlights at the gala night, which took place at the national library. Mathematical precision and the ability to think laterally were not only characteristics of Brahe – they can also be attributed to Sophie Skach. For her collections, she not only uses her skills as a mathematician, but also those of a fashion and knitwear designer. As a result, her designs feature glass fibres woven into the fabric and applied to garments that light up on demand, evoking the star explosions Brahe described and which he called new stars. With that in mind, the collection presented as part of the Vienna Awards is an ode to the concept of scientific “enlightenment”.
LATERAL THINKER
The JMB Fashion Team was once again involved in producing the spectacular men’s collection, which represented a challenge for the skilled staff in Rohr, Styria. The success of the collaboration between Sophie Skach and the JMB Fashion Team is based on a common “self-understanding” and on the unsaid – thanks to the knowhow and the quest for quality of the employees in Rohr, that’s all it takes, according Skach. “A special relationship that is based on a high level of appreciation“, says the designer with a penchant for natural sciences.
The London-based designer appreciates the open relationship, the honest feedback and the sustainability that resonates when the JMB Fashion Team gets to work. Sophie Skach: „Luxury craft. It’s lovely that it still exists in Austria“.