Fashion Project Seeks to Create a 3D Printed Crowdsourced Dress With Over 150 Elements

This seems to be the week for 3D printed clothing. We have covered several stories including a major fashion show which featured dozens of incredible 3D printed pieces, as well as the Russian company which 3D printed lingerie in order to circumvent a new law which forbids the sale of lace underwear. When it comes to designing 3D printable fashion, the artist’s creativity can really run wild. That’s what is so spectacular about 3D printing. It allows for one’s imaginative ideas to be transformed into an actual physical product.

We are all designers in some way or another, looking to align what we find around us in a way which can echo our expressions and personality to the world. A Dutch based fashion designer named Anouk Wipprecht, seems to agree. Wipprecht, who is a rising star in the emerging field of ‘interactive couture’ has a knack for bringing technology and fashion together. She has had her work showcased around the world, from Hollywood to Cirque du Soleil, and she even created the outfit worn by Fergie of the ‘Black Eyed Peas’ during their Super Bowl halftime performance in 2011.

“She most recently completed an artist residency program with Autodesk, where she merged electronics, 3D printing and fashion, to create a Faraday Dress,” explained Amelise Javier-Lane, public relations manager at Autodesk, to 3DPrint.com. “The custom-built metallic dress was paired with a spiked helmet and plate-metal dress, then secured in head-to-toe suit of chain mail. To conduct the electricity, she attached toy plasma balls into shoulder ornaments. Standing between two Tesla coils, the dress safely conducted the coils’ electrical bursts around her body and into the ground while lighting up her shoulders with tendrils of purple plasma.”

The project she is working on next, in collaboration with Polaire, is actually a project which we can all work on, a crowdsourced 3D printed dress. Sound confusing? Well, it’s actually quite a simple concept which Wipprecht is incredibly excited about. Called the ‘Open Source Element Dress‘, the idea behind the project is to get over 150 different elements of the dress 3D printed and sent to Wipprecht. Those elements will all have the same basic structure and dimensions to ensure that they will fit together properly. To get started you may download the dress element 3D model at Tinkercad. Once downloaded, users can freely manipulate the design, making sure certain dimensions stay the same, so that they will fit together with one another. Whether you want to change the color of the element, build upon it however you’d like, or even combine several elements to create a larger feature within the dress, this is all possible, and encouraged.

Once your design is complete you will need to have it 3D printed. This can be done on a 3D printer at home, or outsourced to a 3D printing service such as imaterialize, Shapeways, or whatever other service you may wish to use. It will then need to be shipped ASAP to the following address, as it needs to be received, at the latest on Sept. 10th:

THE OPEN SOURCE ELEMENT DRESS
Anouk Wipprecht x Polaire
Schottenfeldgasse 72/8c
1070 Wien, Austria

Then on September 13th and 14th, all the dress elements will be collected together during Vienna Fashion Week in Vienna, Austria, and the first version will be demonstrated and modified several times during the event. For those who participate, the projects’s Facebook page will be giving a ‘shout out’ to designers as they receive their elements in the mail.  The dress will be presented at ‘Dutch Design Night” which is on September 14th.

As Karl Lagerfeld once said, “Fashion is a language that creates itself in clothes to interpret reality.”  What will be your little piece of fashion looks like?  

If you do participate in this creative project, please post your design in the crowdsourced dress forum thread on 3DPB.com. Get started at the Instructables page right here.