Without question, there’s often an element of the unpractical if not absurd when it comes to haute couture. Models sporting sometimes outrageous albeit unquestionably artful garments, head- and footwear seem perfectly comfortable on runways but would doubtlessly be challenged to function beyond the catwalk–even sitting down seems implausible in many such get-ups. Of course, that’s hardly the point with some of the most creative couture and if the ultimate objective is to demonstrate what’s possible (rather than what’s practical), then the collective creativity showcased in the recent Shining3D Fashion Show is a smashing success.
Chinese 3D digitizing and printing titan, Shining3D teamed up with Pinshape, a growing online 3D-printing service and community, as well as an array of other sponsors to host the 2015 Shining3D Fashion Show Design Contest. Contestants were invited to submit entries between April 20 and May 15 and winning creations were presented on the runway and its backdrop of large-scale video screens at the Third World 3D Printing Technology Industry Conference and The Second World Expo, in Chengdu, China.
Shining 3D, founded in 2014, is a broad-spectrum 3D digitizing and printing company. That is, they’ve been providing machinery and services in many different sectors, from industrial manufacturing and biomedical technology to education and cultural and artistic creation. Shining 3D can proudly boast being China’s first over-the-counter provider of 3D digitizing and 3D printing. Their market has expanded to a global one over the past ten years.
Design categories for the competition included garments, shoes, eyewear, hats, accessories, jewelry and anything else couture-related. However, it was couture with a 3D-tech twist and Shining 3D exhorted contestants to come up with “innovative, exciting, and fashion-forward ideas” that rely on 3D technology to come to life. They were not disappointed and the results exceeded all expectations.
The grand prize winner was from Korean designers Joo Yunsik, Lee Soyeon, Lee Hyunsu, and Joo Junesik. This wildly creative team are a part of ‘Piece 3D Printing Fashion Studio’ in which they collaborate with other creative designers. They took the top prize for Fallen Angel, a fully 3D printed ensemble that includes a skirt, a corset-like bodice, and a spectacular set of 3D-printed wings, all in pristine white. The garment earned the high-tech couturier cabal ￥20,000 (around $3,225 USD), an Einscan-S desktop 3D Scanner from Shining3D, and the opportunity to share their design with the world via the 3D Printing Fashion Show.
One of the most exciting possibilities where 3D printed couture is concerned is with headwear. The first prize winner Yonghe Wu, a graduate from the Institute of Arts and Crafts in Xiamen China and founder of Taishiyike, 
The second place winners were Min-Chieh Chen’s Hex Chain Dress and its companion Mahuika Necklace by Han-Yin Hsu from Pinshape. Min-Chieh Chen is an architect at ETHZ (MAS) and co-founder of Lung Lung Designs Co. Ltd. as well as an architectural researcher at Tamkang University (MA). He works and researches in the fields of digital fabrication, parametric materials design, and simulation of design processes. His Hex Chain Dress in vibrant red is reminiscent of reptilian scales but ones that have ordered themselves into interlocking hexagons, a mesh like a second skin.
Han-Yin Hsu, founder of ANNXANNXDESIGN in Los Angeles regards the body as another landscape amenable to architecture in small scale. His Mahuika Necklace consists of intricate, interlocking, 3D-printed metallic forms that appear to come to life on the landscape of the body in motion. Both designers won a showing on the runway and the big screens as well as ￥5,000 and an Einscan-S desktop 3D Scanner from Shining3D.
In third place was Moving Fish, a complex and layered, 3D printed dress created by Sabina Sagadiyeva and the Art Nouveau Shoe by Benjamin Cann. Moving Fish is perhaps the most fascinating example of the top designs with respect to how 3D design and printing can accommodate creativity in fashion design. The dress seems for all the world like a living thing, part fish anatomy, including the bone structure, part water and aquatic vegetation, and part motion as it describes the disruption of the water by the fish’s graceful yet erratic undulation. While perhaps less-than-practical as a garment, it incorporates the body as a means of setting in motion rather than simply displaying it.
Finally, no garment is complete without complementary footwear, although Cann’s Art Nouveau Shoes stand on their own (forgive the obvious pun). It’s as though Cann took a tube of garnet-colored lipstick and proceeded to pen the most sinuous Art Nouveau lines to create these contemporary Cinderella slippers.
Sagadiyeva is a graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology and also studied in Milan at the Politecnico school. She cites Oscar De la Renta, Carolina Herrera, and Vera Wang as major influences. Cann is the founder and director of Eugenio, a company that specializes in 3D engineering and design solutions. Sagadiyeva and Cann showed their creations at the fashion show and won an Einstart-S desktop 3D printer from Shining3D.
All of the winning designs are testaments of, among other things, the almost infinite possibilities that can manifest when 3D technology and fashion intersect. For more examples of the ingenious, innovative, and the-future-is-now designs prompted by the contest, see Pinshape’s review of the show. Let us know which of these designs were your favorite in the Pinshape / Shining3D Fashion forum thread on 3DPB.com