hands and the facial bit was a little tiny, old black-and-white taxi driver photo in the
corner, from the past. I don’t know what the artist wants; I’m not inside their heads.
So when you go for these portraits, do you get to meet the artists? Do they work with you
or do they usually paint from photos?
The specific regulation is they have to sign a document saying that you sat and posed,
one-to-one with that artist for, I think it is, one hour. But normally they just come in and
take a whole lot of photos and then once they’ve looked at the photos and sort of soak
them in, they spend a day wandering with me around various ABC radio shows. Then at
the end of it they sit me down for an hour and they get you to try different aspects that
they want.
So I guess you get to know the artist?
It’s difficult. They don’t want you to talk because they’re thinking and being creative. If
you talk to them you might muck up their creativity.
Do you see a growing overlap between science and fashion - with people wearing more
technology, such as the iWatch, high-tech implants, etc?
Well, fashion was one of our first technologies, starting off with the fur coat from an
animal and working your way to actually weaving fabrics, but then into just pure art that
you’d wear as decoration. The way we’re going now is in many, many different
directions. For example, the sports bra, that automatically freezes up when you start
running, the clothes that monitor your temperature, and the clothes that are now going to
be invisible to infra-red. That’s a whole new technology that only came out in store
recently. Just imagine that you’re inside a building and it's air conditioned and, firstly,
imagine that you’re wearing the bare minimum of clothing, like a T-shirt and shorts.
And now imagine that you’re wearing full, Antarctic grey cold weather clothing that traps
infrared heat from your body, so you have to have massive, massive cooling on the
outside. So the air con unit has to work really hard to cool you down. If you then make
clothing that is invisible to infra-red, in other words the infra-red just passes straight
through it, then you can reduce the air conditioning loads that the building has to
maintain. They’ve only now just recently realised that clothing is enormously opaque to
infra-red and perhaps the heat, so if we could have clothing that looks the same to the
naked eye, but actually let’s all the heat out, that means that you could have less of a load
on the air conditioning and that means less burning of electricity.
I guess that’d be really good, especially with the increasingly hot Australian summers,
having clothes that are perhaps more bearable to wear.
Sure! You can have clothes that also reflect heat, as well. There are massive amounts of
technologies coming down that are so-called ‘smart clothing’, and I kind of classify them
as diagnostic or therapeutic. In other words, in diagnostic they look at you and see that
you might be slouchy or that your heart rate’s a bit high or your blood pressure’s a bit
high, and in therapeutic they might let the heat straight out of your body. They might
freeze up a little bit to encourage you to have a better posture, and so forth. And this is
going to be a major change in our society over the next 20 years in fashion because the
clothes will become a lot smarter.