Miss Sohee in the house

“I’ve been an artist my whole life,” says fashion designer Sohee Park, sitting down to talk in the Large Library on a visit to Goodwood. It’s a statement that the London-based South Korean designer, though shy and reserved by nature, is confident of making. Growing up in Seoul, Park signed all her childhood drawings “Miss Sohee” – now the name of her much-talked-about fashion label. Her couture designs have seen the Central Saint Martins 2020 graduate heralded as a bright new talent by everyone from Dolce & Gabbana, who praised her “creative vision”, to New York culture mag Paper, which hailed her as “London’s next rising fashion star”. Her designs have been seen on everyone from supermodels (Naomi Campbell, Bella Hadid) to Vice President Kamala Harris, and more than a handful of international pop stars, including Miley Cyrus and Ariana Grande.

Park is here today to soak up some inspiration in her capacity as Goodwood’s 2023 Talent in Fashion award-winner, a role that will see her presenting original designs that will debut at the opening ceremony of the Qatar Goodwood Festival this August. “Goodwood is such an Eden, with a very rich history. Every corner has a different story to tell. I could spend days wandering around all the breathtaking art pieces, and then you have the architecture and nature that surrounds Goodwood. And I’m inspired by all the Duchesses’ wardrobes!” laughs Park. “I feel so honoured that my designs will become a part of this beautiful estate, alongside so many classical and contemporary pieces.”

Park’s mother is a successful children’s illustrator in Korea and, like her, Park has always drawn prolifically. “But after I saw a Chanel couture show on television, I became obsessed with fashion,” she recalls. “Before that, the only way I knew to explore my creative vision was on paper or canvas. But through fashion, people live and breathe your creations – they become something entirely different. From then on, I watched all the shows I could on my iPod Nano – I would even sneak it into school and watch during class,” she admits with a grin. “The screen was so tiny the teacher didn’t know.” But when it comes to fashion, she’s definitely studious, spending every waking moment on her designs.

Graduating from Central St Martins during a 2020 Covid-19 lockdown meant that Park had no final year fashion show at which to present. Having interned during her degree with designers including Marc Jacobs (whose team in New York she joined for six months), Park was determined to present her own vision, and released a series of dramatic photographs of her debut collection, The Girl In Full Bloom. It would be a seminal moment for Park, catapulting her to global recognition. Her skill in creating sculptural, floral-inspired pieces in vivid, jewel-like colours immediately won her some highly influential fans, including the fashion designer Christian Cowan, who promptly invited Park to collaborate on looks for his show in New York in September. By 2022, she would have the opportunity to present her own runway show, this time during Milan Fashion Week, at the invitation of Dolce & Gabbana.

Since finding high-profile success, “the most touching moment for me was when I saw my pieces in the Victoria and Albert Museum,” says Park. “To think that they will stay there forever is such an honour.” Her designs feature in the V&A’s Korean Wave exhibition, which will travel the world for next two years, before joining the museum’s permanent collection. “I also created a Christmas tree for the V&A. In the studio, we made a dress that looked like an angel [for the top of the tree], which had to be created in a very short time and required vast amounts of material – and even its own three-metre mannequin.”

Requests from public figures and their stylists to wear Park’s designs have poured in ever since October 2020, when Miley Cyrus performed on The Graham Norton Show in one of Park’s colourful metallic gowns. Actress Gemma Chan has also chosen to wear Miss Sohee. Rapper Cardi B has been another prominent fan of the label, most notably asking Park to create her look for the 2023 Met Gala. Inspired by Karl Lagerfeld’s fall 2008 couture collection, Park – who cites Lagerfeld as one of her biggest influences – and her team created a gown for Cardi featuring 27,000 hand-embellished crystals and pearls.

“People assume I’m closely connected to these celebrities, but I didn’t know anyone; people only came to me after seeing my work,” says Park. “My tutor from university came to the studio last month and saw that I was exhausted, but he told me to appreciate how special this moment is. And he’s right – I feel privileged to have this opportunity.”

The designer has built her reputation from the UK, and feels settled here.“London is home for me now. For someone in fashion there’s so much more to see in the UK. I’m a creative and I thrive here, and the countryside is so pretty. I especially love the Cotswolds, and Cornwall, and the Downs around Goodwood.”

Park is looking forward to debuting the designs that she has created drawing inspiration from the treasures and history of the Goodwood Estate, and she is thrilled that her Miss Sohee Goodwood gowns will be kept for future generations as part of Goodwood’s Collection. She also has plans for a capsule collection to be debuted towards the end of the year. Park jokes that the true CEO of Miss Sohee is her white rabbit Munchie, who sits in the studio and observes everything. “I’ve had rabbits all my life and I’m very good with them. Alice in Wonderland is my favourite book and Munchie is my white rabbit, leading me in all the right directions!” It has certainly worked for her so far.

Miss Sohee’s gowns for Goodwood will be debuted at the opening ceremony of the Qatar Goodwood Festival on Tuesday 1 August (goodwood.com/horseracing/qatar-goodwood-festival/); missohee.com

*Based on an EQE 300 AMG Line and a fully charged battery. UK spec may vary. Official government consumption in kWh/100km (combined) for the EQE Saloon –224-165. CO2 emissions in g/km (combined): 0. Further information about the test used can be found at www.mercedes-benz.co.uk/WLTP. Correct as of print, 06/23.

Keep going: the EQE Saloon with a range of up to 376 miles* on one charge.

INNOVATIONS BY than ego and one-upmanship. But as Alex Moore reports, space exploration could offer untold benefits for the human race n Christmas Eve, 1968, while orbiting the moon for a fourth time, NASA astronaut Bill Anders captured what is now considered the most influential environmental photograph ever taken. Earthrise, as the shot has come to be known, wasn’t the first photo of Earth from space, but none before it had captured the planet’s vast loneliness, fragility and striking beauty in quite the same way. National Geographic photographer Brian Skerry likened the image – often credited with helping to launch the environmental movement – to humanity seeing itself in a mirror for the first time.

Earthrise was the first and arguably the most poignant example of how our being in space can benefit humanity. For the most part, space exploration feels like our way of preparing to disembark from Earth rather than nurture it, but perhaps that’s more to do with how science fiction tends to portray it. At the same time, without at least an elementary grasp of astrophysics, much of the work done in space is difficult to fathom – abstract, almost. It’s easy to assume, for example, that Juice, the European Space Agency’s mission to find water on Jupiter’s icy moons, will have little bearing on our day-to-day existence. Or that NASA’s $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) – which will have an exhibit at Future Lab at Goodwood’s Festival of Speed this year – might strike some as a self-serving investment. US President Joe Biden’s comments about the telescope embodying how America leads the world, “not by the example of our power, but the power of our example”, have done little to suggest otherwise.

But let’s not forget that behind the technology required to see 13 billion years back in time, there is a global team of over 10,000 scientists. “Science is all joined up so the more we understand about the universe, the more we understand about everything,” explains Gillian Wright, the European principal investigator for the Mid-Infrared instrument (MIRI) on the JWST. “If we understand more about the chemistry and atmosphere of other planets then we can understand more about the chemistry and atmosphere of our own. And we certainly care about that.”

Dr Matt Greenhouse, Project Scientist for the JWST, has rather juicier news. “There are billions of habitable worlds in our galaxy,” he says. “We know how to search for life on them by studying the chemical composition of their atmosphere with spectroscopy. The search for extra-terrestrial life is now very much a major scientific objective of NASA.”

Still, how does that help us in the short term? “With projects like this there are typically lots of spin-off applications of the technologies that we develop, and with the JWST this is already occurring,” explains Greenhouse. “From medical eye surgery techniques to specific integrated circuits, society gets back much more that it expends in doing projects like this.”

Similarly, over the years, the International Space Station has proven to be a hotbed for scientific research and innovation (just try inventing Bose-Einstein condensate, a fifth state of matter, on Earth), but after more than 177,000 laps of our planet, it’s due to be retired in January 2031. Which of course leaves the door open for any number of commercial space “destinations”.

“We have all these problems on Earth, so why does space matter?” asks Dylan Taylor, the founder and CEO of Voyager Space, one of the companies behind Starlab, a new international space station due to launch in 2028. “Well,” he answers, “for developing life-saving drugs that can only be developed in space. Or AgTech solutions that will address food scarcity. Or big data regarding climate change that can only be gathered in space.”

Space Forge, a Cardiff-based startup enabling low-orbit manufacture across a range of industries, predicts that the next industrial revolution will be in space. It’s a grandiose claim, but as the brand’s business development manager, Neil Monteiro, explains, working in a vacuum in microgravity allows us to create incredibly valuable materials that we have long theorised about but previously never had the means to create. “We’ve known what we’d make in these environments for 50 years or so,” he says. “We’re starting with semiconductors, fibre-optics and alloys, materials that will make certain processes on Earth unimaginably much more efficient. We estimate that for every kilogramme of CO2 we produce, we’ll save 80 tonnes.”

Another grandiose claim, but this seems to be the nature of space, an industry built on unbridled ambition. And Monteiro can back it up. One application of these semiconductors would be to dramatically speed up EV charging stations. There is talk of making single fibre-optic cables long enough to reach across the Atlantic. And while still hypothetical, the aim is to make alloys better capable of withstanding the heat required for nuclear fusion. Dr Greenhouse says that as the advancement of science and material development reaches the limits of what can be achieved in an environment affected by gravity: “The opportunity to operate in microgravity could be as meaningful as the switch from analogue to digital.”

Of course, to be deemed an industrial revolution, these materials need to be made on an industrial scale, and Monteiro admits it’s SpaceX – whose Falcon 9 rockets will transport Space Forge’s unmanned manufacturing platforms into low-Earth orbit – that is making this possible. In fact, more than 60 per cent of the global launch market is now controlled by Elon Musk’s space enterprise. No surprise then that SpaceX is leading the way in the “new space race”. That is, the race to build a satellite network capable of bringing the Internet to the estimated 4.4 billion people currently living without access to the “worldwide” web. Starlink, as Musk’s ever-growing constellation of satellites is known, already provides Internet access to over 50 countries and plans to begin Satellite 5G Cell Phone Coverage – eliminating signal dead-zones worldwide – in August this year.

Richard Garriott, America’s only second-generation astronaut, and the current President of the 120-year-old Explorers Club, has devoted his life to the advancement of commercial space exploration. He was one of the original founders of the Ansari X Prize, a global competition that offered $10 million to the first privately financed team that could build and fly a three-passenger rocket into space twice within two weeks. The prize was won in 2004 by SpaceShipOne, a spacecraft designed by Burt Rutan and financed by Paul Allen, the co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft, and eventually bought by Richard Branson, paving the way for Virgin Galactic.

“Falcon 9 has been revolutionary in terms of lowering costs and increasing payloads,” says Garriott, whose family office, Global Space Ventures, works closely with the US military on its galactic endeavours. But Starship [SpaceX’s new fully reusable launch vehicle] will be a game changer. Already, we’re having the conversation about mining asteroids. They say that whoever manages that will become the world’s first trillionaire, yet as recently as 20 years ago, it was very difficult to raise even a few million dollars for anything to do with space. How times have changed.”

Nowhere are the tides of change more evident than in the space tourism sector, where the opportunity to behold the Earth in all its glory may also have unforeseen benefits. Cosmologist and author Carl Sagan wrote, “There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” For if Earthrise, a single photograph, could have caused such a monumental impact, imagine witnessing Earth’s majesty first-hand.

The “overview effect” is a cognitive change of consciousness reported by some astronauts while observing Earth from space. Many claim to have experienced a transcendent sense of awe and an urge, like Sagan, to protect the planet at all costs. That’s all very well, but presumably most of the people who have had the privilege of regarding Earth from such a distance meant it no harm anyway. Very soon the world’s wealthiest jetsetters will be able to book a long weekend at The Hilton Starlab (which is actually a thing). Or for something slightly more chic, French industrial designer Philippe Starck has taken care of the crew quarters on the Axiom Space Station. Neither are explicitly offering bed and breakfast, but Garriott surely won’t be alone in fancying his chances of a visit. So what happens when scientists and astronauts are joined by artists, poets, politicians and thinkers? The first guests are bound to be among the world’s most influential people. Is a weekend long enough for this supposed cognitive shift?

Scotland’s first astronaut, Dave Mackay is the Chief Pilot of Virgin Galactic and has experienced the overview effect on several occasions. He says, “Reflecting on what you’ve done, where you’ve been and what you’ve seen is something that happens over days, weeks, months, and even years. I still feel very emotional when I think about it now. I have these images seared into my mind and I’ll describe them as best as I can but often what I say feels inadequate. Someone with a background in the humanities could convey these emotions, feelings and sensations far better than an engineer or test pilot.”

“That’s actually a big part of what it is to be an astronaut these days,” says Sian Cleaver, a Chelmsford-born engineer working on NASA’s Artemis programme. “There’s a heavy emphasis on whether you’re a good communicator. Those who go to space represent the human race, so they have a duty to share their experiences and to inspire the rest of us.”

The aim of the Artemis programme is to send astronauts to the moon, and then Mars, while “diversifying space”. Artemis was the sister of Apollo, so it’s a fitting name for a mission to put the first woman, and indeed the first person of colour, on the moon. “I think that’s what space is about,” says Cleaver. “If you’re up there looking down at the Earth, you don’t see any borders, you don’t see any divisions. Here at the European Space Agency, I work directly with people from 10 different countries. It’s international, it’s collaborative, and I think that really embodies the whole spirit of space exploration.”

Fifty years to the day after taking the Earthrise photo, Bill Anders observed, “We set out to explore the moon and instead discovered the Earth.” That, it would seem, is the beauty, and indeed the value, of space exploration.

Discover more at “Beyond Earth, For Earth” at FOS Future Lab (13-16 July).

The world’s oldest endurance race celebrates its centenary this year, yet petrolheads have been flocking to Le Mans for even longer. In 1906 this ancient city on the river Sarthe hosted the very first French Grand Prix, on a 64-mile road circuit to the west.

Five years later an unofficial Grand Prix de France set a 40-mile course to the south, heading out via the villages of Les Hunaudières and Mulsanne towards Écommoy. The 1920 French motorcycle Grand Prix took the same road to Mulsanne, then returned to Le Mans via Arnage, establishing the basic layout of today’s 8.4-mile Circuit de la Sarthe. Although modified several times, it still includes stretches of public road, not least the 3.7-mile blast to Mulsanne, properly called the Ligne Droite des Hunaudières but known to generations of British enthusiasts as the Mulsanne Straight.

An endurance race was conceived in 1922 when the French subsidiary of British bike and wheel manufacturer Rudge-Whitworth offered a prize fund of 100,000 francs to Georges Durand, secretary of the Automobile Club d’Ouest (ACO). Recognising the potential of an event that promoted reliability rather than speed, Durand consulted ACO president Gustave Singher and journalist Charles Faroux, who suggested a series of 24-hour races held over three consecutive years, with the car travelling the greatest overall distance winning the Rudge-Whitworth Triennial Cup. First run on 26-27 May 1923, the Grand Prix d’Endurance de 24 Heures dropped the multi-year format after 1928 and has been an annual fixture ever since, bar 1936 (general strike) and 1940-48 (world war).

One might suppose that the earliest races were the most difficult, running on gravel roads at average speeds approaching 60mph, yet in 1923 no fewer than 30 of the 33 starters finished. As speeds have risen, reaching a peak in the late 1980s, when sports prototypes rocketed past Les Hunaudières at 250mph, the strain on the machinery (not to mention the drivers) has only increased.

The challenge remains, as ever, to cover the greatest possible distance in 24 hours, which requires speed, fuel efficiency, reliability, stamina, strategy, courage and luck, not to mention innovations in aerodynamics, braking and power systems. Of 25 marques that have secured outright victory, only 12 have managed it more than once.

Nevertheless, for the quarter of a million racegoers who make the annual pilgrimage to northwest France, the technical competition is only part of the attraction. Like campfires, fireworks or sci-fi movies (and standing trackside in the small hours is as close an encounter as you could wish for) the mysteriously romantic spectacle of night racing draws spectators as moths to a flame. It’s little wonder that the ACO’s promotional posters often featured illustrations of blazing headlamps, at least until the 1960s, when photography took the lead and focused on daylight scenes.

Whether illustrations are more evocative than photographs is a moot point. Vintage Le Mans posters of any type can sell for huge sums and reproductions are common; the ACO now sells copies in the hope that enthusiasts will be less tempted to snatch them from public spaces. After all, who wouldn’t want a souvenir of the world’s greatest race on their wall?