Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: industrial designer Leonie Tenthof van Noorden, who uses 3D scanning to produce bespoke dresses, claims the technique will soon be commonplace in fashion stores (+ movie).

“In the future you will go into a store where you get a 3D body scan and start assembling and customising a unique garment for yourself,” van Noorden says in the movie. “After a few days you’ll get your unique design delivered at home.”

Van Noorden presented a range of leather dresses from her This Fits Me collection at Dutch Design Week 2014, where this movie was filmed. Each dress was produced using 3D scanning.

“It’s about creating unique garments through 3D-scanning and generative design,” she says. “It’s a bit like a digital tailor.”

Van Noorden created a very basic dress design, which she can easily scale to the exact proportions of the customer.

“The customer gets a body scan so you get a 3D model of the body in the computer,” she explains. “I scale the dress accordingly and then project a generative line pattern on top of that digital dress.”

The generative pattern enables customers to customise the dress around the curves of their body, within the rules set by van Noorden. She then uses this personalised design to create the pattern pieces for the dress, which are laser-cut out of leather and stitched together.

“When the customer has selected their unique design, the line pattern actually becomes the seams in the garment,” van Noorden explains. “The 3D model is translated from digital to physical.”

The technique could be used with a variety of different materials, but van Noorden chose leather to emphasise the pattern of the seams.

“We used leather because it makes a very nice curve on the dresses,” she says. “It creates a little bit of a 3D effect.”

This movie was filmed in Eindhoven at Dutch Design Week 2014. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by local hip hop producer Y’Skid.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers is an ongoing collaboration with MINI exploring how design and technology are coming together to shape the future.

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