The Baltimore fashion designer Jill Andrews has spent her career making bespoke wedding dresses, bodices and skirts for hundreds of happy clients. This Friday, she will make her debut at New York’s Fashion Week. Not with a fancy gown, but with an ingenious suit designed to fight Ebola.
Andrews was part of a team based at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore that developed a drastically redesigned and simplified prototype of the Ebola protective suit. The single-piece, fully integrated suit cuts the removal process by three quarters to just 5 minutes. It takes the wearer just eight steps to shed it. Current models require 20 movements and an assistant. “It’s all engineering,” Andrews says. “If you can build a bra, you can build a bridge.”
Andrews learned about the project from her friend who works at Hopkins. “My studio is just a couple of blocks from the campus and I wanted to help,” she says.
Richard Lamporte, vice president for development at Jhpiego [Jah-Pie-Go], the Johns Hopkins non-profit involved in the effort, said the “reduction in the number of steps and their complexity was a key criteria for the suit.”
Just before Halloween, she met the team, which included students, engineers, medical and public health specialists, and even an architect. They watched presentations about proper donning and doffing of protective suits for healthworkers, learned about design requirements, identified potential contamination points, and tried to engineer around them. “I love parameters,” Andrews says. “Wedding gowns include a lot of problem solving. My Jewish Orthodox clients, for example, like to dance, but their dress must remain modest. You have to combine all of these.”
Jill Andrews at her Baltimore studio. Besides crafting the Ebola suit, she recently launched a new collection. Image credit: Jill Andrews
The team broke up to different groups and started generating ideas, selecting and combining existing concepts, and rapidly prototyping elements of the suit to make sure they were going to work. “In order to get something quickly into the field, we wanted to use parts that are already in production,” Andrews says.
She started sewing segments of the suit at her studio from Tychem, a proven heavy-duty industrial fabric made by DuPont. Of course, there were changes. They included moving the zipper to the back, like a wet suit, and attaching tabs to zippers to allow healthcare professionals an easier way out. “We wanted them to emerge as if from a cocoon,” Andrews says.
By Thanksgiving, the team had a working prototype. The suit has already won a spot among five finalists of the “Grand Challenge” competition to fight Ebola, which was organized by the U.S. Agency for International Development. The team will use USAID funding to move the prototype closer to mass production.
Jhpiego, the GE Foundation, which is backing Ebola programs in the U.S. and in Africa and provided funding for the non-profit, and the International Rescue Committee will present the suit at New York Fashion Week this Friday, February 13. The pop-up event will take place from 5 to 7pm at The Empire Hotel located at 44 W 63rd Street in Manhattan.
GIFs created from Youtube video courtesy of Johns Hopkins University. Graphic courtesy of JHU.