Please print this dress for me

Stratasys' developments have proven themselves in a wide variety of fields: they help in medicine, help create murder weapons, but now this company has been seen behind the "creation of artistic images" at Paris Fashion Week.

Namely:

Dutch designer Iris van Herpen presented a collection of clothes printed on a 3D printer at the Paris Fashion Week. The applied technology allows using different materials in one element (for example, when a part of an object must have increased rigidity and the other must be flexible). These are exactly the two dresses with 3D effects created by Iris.





You cannot call them avant-garde, but fashion critics were most impressed with how these costumes were created. The fashion designer was assisted by Austrian architect Julia Kerner, the Belgian company Materialize and artist-architect Neri Oksman from Media Lab (MIT). After the show in Paris, “three-dimensional” dresses will be exhibited at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). When creating outfits, the Stratasys Objet Connex 3D printer was used, which was able to “combine” the features of various materials in one fabric. “The ability to vary softness and elasticity inspired us to develop a“ second skin ”for the body,” Neri notes. According to Oksman, fashion designers got a chance to create not only the form of the outfit, but also its movement. According to the architect, now we can talk about "tech-couture", that is, the merger of technology with high fashion.

How does this happen?:

First, the fantastic dresses of the Dutch fashion designer are designed in Photoshop. Iris then works with architects to create a 3D model that prints from polymer over the course of a week, resulting in a dress that is an exact copy of a sketch. Of course, not all dresses are fully printed on a 3D printer, but each has parts created using this technology. Given that a 3D printer can only print figures made of solid materials such as plastic, it is not surprising that the costumes seem tough and not very comfortable. Unfortunately, we can only guess what they feel.

The future is already near and I hope that in about 5-10 years we will be able to print clothes to our liking.

via