Neri Oxman wants to grow the colors on your clothes

At Oxman, a New York design studio, you’ll find four capes. They hang off a mannequin in soft folds, each knitted from a single piece of silk. Their color is uneven. Deep indigo collects in the ridges of the material, black shades in the valleys, blues appear in slightly crooked lines. The pigment is streaked and faded, so no two sections look the same. A commercial dye house would call this a defect and throw it out. But here, the inconsistency is the point. The color on the fabric was...