Mother and son's creations lighting up the fashion world

What do you get when you combine a mom with a passion for fashion design with a son who’s a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at UC San Diego?

In the case of family entrepreneurs Rachel Merrill and Devon Merrill of San Diego, you get Lighted Clothing, a new company that is pushing boundaries in the field of illuminated fashion.

Since they started their collaboration about 18 months ago, the Merrills have co-created five fashion pieces that incorporate LED lights, fiber optics, hidden batteries and tiny computers that create streaks of lightning on a dress, moving bands of color and pictures on a vest and waves of glowing light on a skirt that grow brighter whenever its wearer moves.

Last month, the Merrills won a national “Textiles in Technology” award in the Surface Design Association’s Future Fabrication: Exhibition in Print 2017. They were among seven winners chosen from a field of 250 entries by jurors Richard Elliott, a textiles expert and professor at the California College of the Arts in Oakland, and Cathryn Hall, from the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft.

Elliott said the concept of illuminated clothing has been around for at least five years, but the Merrills have taken the technology up a notch in a visually striking way.

“Their work really exemplifies the optimal combination of sheer fabric to diffuse the light, so it’s not so gaudy and bright, and the element of motion that mimics the movements of the wearer,” Elliott said. “What’s fascinating about their collaboration is that it’s cross-generational. I haven’t seen that before and their abilities are so compatible with one another.”

Rachel Merrill—a retired biotechnology acquisitions attorney who lives with her husband, Lex, in Carmel Valley—said she’s enjoyed finding a new way to express her creativity. But she’s most happy about collaborating with her 29-year-old son.

“I feel like it’s a gift,” she said. “Not many parents have an opportunity to do something with their grown children that’s so creative and that draws so completely on their different interests and skills. It’s precious time.”

Rachel and Devon Merrill both come from crafty backgrounds, but illuminated fashion wasn’t on either of their radars until 2016.

Rachel taught her self to sew in her mid-20s by bringing home Vogue patterns and learning to make clothes by trial and error. Devon developed a love for tinkering from his dad, Lex, whose hobby is rebuilding antique radios. By the time he was at Torrey Pines High School, Devon was soldering his own home electronics and writing computer code.

One hobby the family shares is hiking. When Rachel retired in 2012, she spent four months hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, eventually logging more than 2,000 miles. But injuries forced her to give up the sport three years ago and she went looking for a more sedentary hobby. She found it when she signed up for a fashion design class at San Diego Mesa College in spring 2016.

One of her first fashion ideas was Starlight, a hand-dyed blue silk dress with a mesh liner interwoven with 700 strands of illuminated superfine filament. There was just one problem. She had no idea how to work with fiber optics, electronic circuits or computer code.

So she asked Devon—who lives in the UTC area with his girlfriend Enjoli Gomez—to teach her about lights, soldering and building circuits. After she finished weaving the fiber liner for Starlight, he built the computerized controller and wrote the code that creates subtly moving waves of white light.

This sounds easier than it is. The reason illuminated clothes aren’t on every store shelf is the danger factor. A miswired circuit could mean a very real risk of fire.

“I’ve burned myself a few times,” he said, “but I haven’t had a model spontaneously combust yet.”

Last spring, they created Lightning, a lavender sheath dress implanted with four branched channels of light that create the illusion of a moving lightning storm.

Their biggest project to date was Light Dance, a haute-couture dress built for last fall’s Women & Science fashion gala at the Salk Institute.