Transforming lab coats into Cloaks for Sydney WorldPride

‘Not all chemists wear white coats’ proclaimed fading posters on the walls of my school chemistry labs. It’s still undeniably true, and yet two decades later, the lab coat persists as the most iconic sartorial representation of a scientist.

In a new project that launched publicly during Sydney WorldPride this month, we aimed to challenge the normative stereotype of a lab-coat-wearing scientist. Instead, we have reimagined the garment as an identity cloak.

The Cloak project draws together an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and the University of Sydney in Australia, who have partnered LGBTQIA+ scientists with fashion students to ‘transform discarded lab coats into new garments responding to the scientists’ queer histories’. Whereas the lab coat can be viewed as a homogenous, quasi-uniform for scientists (as well as an important piece of personal protective equipment), Cloak has turned them into unique pieces of clothing that represent each scientist’s identity or identities.