30 May 3D printed dress with Nylon and PLA: Kynematics and Nervous System

Printing your dress is possible.

In the last blog post, we talked about how prototyping with 3D printing is now a reality in the medical implants sector.

Another sector in which the true realization of the products happens with the 3D Printers and plastic filaments happens and doesn’t stop with the prototyping is the textile industry or the production of clothing and accessories.

It turns out to be almost difficult to believe that the plastic material is suitable to be dressed, therefore we have selected two projects that use main plastic filaments, PLA and NYLON in particular.

The first one is the case of the American design studio “Nervous System” which created one of the first printed clothes in 3D, folding as the clothes we know, created thanks to a particular Kinematics application.

Thanks to this modelling method the dresses fold to themselves like normal suits leaving from a classic 3D model.

The shapes of the dress are converted by the software into little triangles (as it happens for the preparation of a 3D model to print).

According to stampiamoin3d.com this software also solves another big problem: the size of the print.

The plate of a printer, to contain the dimension of a dress, should be huge. Thanks to Kinematics and the application of special algorithms, the model is compressed to occupy the least possible volume optimizing the print process it and reducing it absolutely up to 85%.

The dress is completely printed in NYLON.

Another example is the designer DANI PELEG.

This young artist uses the PLA filaments to print clothes in 3D “at home”. In the video, it is noticed how the dresses, in this case too, adapt perfectly to models body with waves just like the classic clothes.

The fashion designer has created an entire clothing line printed in 3D in her house with several printers including a Makerbot and a Prusa. Printing clothes for the moment takes about 100 hours to create a cloth model for printing but it is assumed a reduction of up to 50% of the time in the years to come.

As we usually say, the application fields of 3D printing today that know no boundaries are those of art, medicine or fashion.

Finally a sentence from DANI PELEG to Motherboard:

“The only limitation is your imagination, so for young designers and creative people there is a world of opportunities right now!”

Photo Credits: Nervous System, photo by Steve Marsel Studio.