Scientists Created the Blackest Fabric Ever, Then Made a Dress

The tiny black dress may be a fashion classic, but making the tiny, perfectly black dress is more a job for scientists. In nature, black can be tremendously functional and fashionable, but for materials engineers, recreating that level of darkness for real-world applications is challenging.

A team of designers, ornithologists, and materials scientists at Cornell University have successfully developed a method to create “ultrablack” fabric, described in a recent Nature Communications…