It’s a timeless and versatile fashion staple, appropriate for every occasion—the LBD, or ‘little black dress’. But you’ve never seen an LBD quite like this one.
A collaboration between a fashion major and scientists at Cornell University has resulted in a unique garment that sports the “darkest fabric” ever made. The shade of the material is known as “ultrablack,” a color that reflects less that 0.5 percent of the light the hits it. This is the first ultrablack material that is not only wearable, but stays dark when viewed from various angles.
To develop the light-absorbing fabric, researchers took inspiration from the extraordinarily black feathers of a tropical bird-of-paradise—Ptiloris magnificus, the ‘magnificent riflebird’—which lives in the rainforests of Papua New Guinea and Australia’s Cape York Peninsula.
The riflebird’s plumage owes its deep, velvety black coloration not just to pigment, but also to its microscopic structure, which involves tightly packed barbules that deflect light inwards, absorbing nearly all of it.
The research team at Cornell’s Responsive Apparel Design Lab (RAD Lab) mimicked this structure in fabric to recreate the same effect in a scalable, wearable and easy-to-manufacture way.
Starting with a simple white merino wool knit, they first dyed it using polydopamine, a synthetic equivalent of the natural melanin pigment found in animal skin and feathers.
Then, they placed the fabric in a plasma chamber, where the etching process created spiky nanoscale growths known as nanofibrils. These ultra-fine spiky structures serve as traps for light, forcing it to bounce around inside the fabric rather than reflecting back out.
The result is remarkable—a material that reflects just 0.13 percent of visible light on average—far below the ultrablack threshold of 0.5 percent. Even better, the fabric remains deeply black across a wide range of viewing angles, up to 120 degrees.
This means that the fabric doesn’t suddenly turn shiny when seen from the side, a common problem with other ultrablack materials.
“From a design perspective, I think it’s exciting because a lot of the ultrablack that exists isn’t really as wearable as ours. And it stays ultrablack even from wider angles,” said paper author professor Larissa Shepherd in a statement.
Unlike other ultrablack materials, the new fabric is easy to manufacture and it can be produced using natural fibers such as wool, cotton and silk.
The developers behind this new fabric already see a range of possible applications—with fashion design major Zoe Alvarez having already used the ultrablack fabric as the centerpiece of a strapless black dress with a splash of iridescent blue.
Images of the dress were used to confirm ultrablack’s true “blackness”: When the image’s contrast, hue, vibrance and brightness were adjusted, all the other color fabrics changed, but the ultrablack material remained the same.
The development could also have application beyond fashion. According to RAD Lab member Kyuin Park, this fabric has potential in many solar thermal applications, converting and utilizing absorbed light into thermal energy.
And, he said, “we could actually use the ultrablack fabric for thermo-regulating camouflage.”
Shepherd said that her team has applied for provisional patent protection for their new fabric as they look to take the material to commercial applications.
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Reference
Jayamaha, H., Park, K., & Shepherd, L. M. (2025). Ultrablack wool textiles inspired by hierarchical avian structure. Nature Communications, 16(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-65649-4