New materials and designs

GPS dress

Hi-tech glow-in-the-dark outfit made from the world’s lightest fabric responds to people’s gaze

Springing To Life

Pauline van Dongen

Van Dongen’s second 3D-printing project, Ruff, was made in collaboration with architect Behnaz Farahi. They wanted to use 3D-printing technologies to create a dynamic, flexible shape that moved around the body. However, they learned the materials often used for 3D printing are rigid and easily broken. To counteract this, van Dongen and Farahi experimented by printing various spring-like plastic shapes. These structures proved to be much more durable and pliable.

Science In Motion

To activate the 3D-printed springs’ movements, van Dongen fitted them with wires made of nitinol--aka nickel titanium. Nitinol exhibits the unique property of shape memory. At one temperature, the metal deforms, but when heated back to its “transformation temperature,” nitinol goes back to its original, undeformed shape. By fitting the nitinol spring with small electric cables, van Dongen was able to adjust its temperature, prompting the wire to expand and contract. The effect was a “breathing like, organic entity” that seemed to crawl over the wearer’s body.

Cheryl Pope - Up Against, 2010/2013

Ying Gao, Wearable Technologies

Zixi Qu

Lilian Hipolyte Mushi

The pleated sleeves of another garment are embedded with Nitinol wire, a shape-memory alloy that becomes rigid when heated. This expands the arms to twice the size and then collapses them back when cool, again highlighting changes in body temperature.

Studio Roosegaarde and Anouk Wipprecht, the clothing is made from leather and electrically-sensitive foils that become opaque or transparent according to alterations in voltage.

Ying Gao: Art, Fashion and Technology presents a dozen pieces that include three series of interactive garments which move and change in response to noise, sound, motion or light.

Product design graduate Amila Hrustić of Bosnia and Herzegovina has created a collection of dresses embellished with clustered geometric shapes.

Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake has designed a range of clothing that expand from two-dimensional geometric shapes into structured shirts, skirts, pants and dresses.

London architect Daniel Widrig has collaborated with fashion designer Iris van Herpen and digital manufacturers .MGX by Materialise to create a collection of digitally printed clothing.

experimental jewellery by Swiss luxury design firm Atelier XJC that references feathers, scales and large delicate ruffs.

Langdi Lin Blooming Body Collection, When Textiles Transform With Body Movement

Origami fashion:

http://uttu-textilesblog.com/2014/02/21/origami-fashion/

Tine de Ruysser – Wearable Metal Origami

Margarida Machado, a young fashion designer based in Lisbon, created a design concept in her Master’s project which she called Transformable Clothes. Transformable Clothes relies on a modular structure that allows the consumer to turn the garments into different forms, creating multiple solutions for one single dress (see picture below). Imagine this dress allows four design variations. Instead of investing large amounts of raw material to produce four different dresses, we could focus our efforts on one single dress that offers four different solutions; that endures four times more, with four times more quality, and that can still be mass-produced. How about that? And this is not even a new idea. There are some remarkable designers and projects that have been diffusing this idea for years through mass customization and DIY concepts. Transformable Clothes is a tool to build from scratch. It gives the consumer the power to create and manage his or her individuality and to convey different messages to others. Most of all, it lasts in a wardrobe because it outlasts short-term trends and style oscillations.

During the tests we tried different materials for the modules (such as felt, different types of artificial leather and Neoprene) different sizes and shapes, ways to connect the modules (through the module itself or with elements such as eyelets, metal screws, and plastic screws)and different schemes of connections.

The best solution we got used two layers of modules, made from artificial leather, that are stitched to each other in the sides, with a corset bone going on the middle. This way, the construction has a more structured behavior. The connections are made from plastic screws because they are lighter than metallic ones (the weight of metal screws forced the structure to expand).