Biology of a sister act

When the banks pulled the plug on Helen Storey, it looked as though the fashion world might have lost one of its boldest innovators. But now she's back - in collaboration with her sister, who inhabits a different milieu altogether.

For Primitive Streak, an exhibition of clothes at the ICA in London inspired by the first 1,000 hours in the life of an embryo, she has got together with Dr Kate Storey, a developmental biologist. The partnership seems to have been fruitful. "I enjoyed working with my sister," says Helen. "I can stand in my corner and say, `Don't be a prat', and she can stand in her corner and say, `Well, you can do what you like, but it's not accurate.'" That they can also have fun together is clear as they pose for the photographer, Kate cracking up at the Abba-like routines he puts them through. The pair have the same striking eyes that hold you in a steady gaze, perhaps slightly wary but very calm and self-possessed.

Funded by the Wellcome Trust, as part of an initiative to explore channels of communication between science and the arts, the project grew out of Dr Storey's work at the Institute of Human Anatomy in Oxford, where she uses chick embryos to study early development. The idea behind Primitive Streak, Dr Storey says, is "to reach a different group of people, perhaps teenagers, to make them aware of some of the basic events in the embryo. A sperm and an egg meet, and after 1,000 hours there's a recognisable human form. We're asking how, time after time, that form is reproduced."

There are 10 main stages in that 1,000 hours, with a garment in the exhibition to illustrate each of them. While the clothes aren't made for wearing, they still have the sweeping elegance and purity of line that first marked Helen Storey out as a burgeoning talent. She started her own label and opened a shop in London in 1984, and her first catwalk show in 1990 made her a fixture of the fashion pages. But that didn't stop the business ending up in receivership. At the same time, she was helping her husband through his struggle with cancer - after which the marriage broke up.

Lately, she has been concentrating on words - newspaper features and a book, Fighting Fashion. Writing runs in the family - they are the daughters of the novelist and playwright, David Storey, who in a roundabout way was the reason why Kate Storey became a biologist. "It was a response to having a father who's charismatic and very perceptive, perhaps too perceptive for an adolescent - knowing that he knew what you were going through wasn't always what you wanted." Then she found biology. "I discovered it had concrete answers, and I was amazed by that. And then I discovered that no one in my family knew anything about it. It was an area that was my own."

"Our paths were very different quite early on," says Helen. While Kate, younger by a year and a bit, was knuckling down to exams, Helen's schooldays, at Hampstead Comprehensive - which is a lot less posh than it sounds - were unhappy and unproductive. "There was a patch of two or three years at the school when it didn't really matter what family you came from, you came out with nothing, and I was part of that era," she says. "I had no sense of having learnt anything when I left. I didn't really have an outlet until I was 19. I did an arts foundation course and from then on it all blossomed." Kate went to a single-sex school - "you could actually get on with your work" - and then attended the sixth form at Camden School for Girls, "which at that stage creamed off the best of the sixth forms around." In some ways, Helen's lack of scientific grounding was an advantage for their project. "I was looking at this project the way a child might look at it."

Her penchant for innovation continues. "If you're trying to represent something totally new, you have to have a textile solution for that. So, bar one fabric, they've all been made by new print techniques, using, for example, sound and fibre optics, and running into areas that, if I were a commercial concern, I wouldn't go near for fear of not being able to dry-clean it or produce it for pounds 9.99. In that sense, it's been highly liberating - it's allowed me to go back to everything I enjoyed at the beginning of my career, the experimental side."

"That's the part of my work I love most," Kate concurs, "designing an experiment then sitting down and doing it." "The more I learnt about Kate's world," Helen continues, "the more I realised how little I knew, and at some stage I had to stop looking - if only to make the deadline, rather than becoming overwhelmed and making the garments too complicated. What I've also had to be very careful to do is not to ridicule science. It'd be very easy to make it into a set of costumes for some alien film."

She hopes the ICA is just the start. There is a catwalk show planned for late November or early December, and she plans to take it on tour. "I like the idea of selling the collection in its entirety to fund the next one," Storey says. "Fashion is the only thing I'm good at, the only thing I love to do. But I've always been frustrated by its constraints. So, if I can find a way through my work to get kids interested in science, that's fantastic."

And will she design again commercially? "If the right opportunity comes along," she says. "I know too much to be able to go back to running up things for Harvey Nicks."

`Primitive Streak' is at the ICA, The Mall, London SW1, from 6-12 October.