Hasta La Ideas

Spiny translucent 3D-printed collars were paired with magnetic dresses and shoes that looks like tree roots in Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen’s latest haute couture collection.

Iris van Herpen‘s Wilderness Embodied collection included dresses and jewellery that combine 3D-printing technology and natural forms.

“My Wilderness collection explores the wilderness that we as human have inside us as well as the wilderness in nature,” she told Dezeen.

Pieces that wrapped around the length of the neck and extended down the chest were decorated with pointy globules tinted purple, blue and pink colours.

These elements were repeated in symmetrical patterns on the see-through layers worn over neutral dresses.

The collars and spiky elements on the dresses were designed in collaboration with architect Isaie Bloch and 3D-printed with additive manufacturing company Materialise.

This season Van Herpen also worked with designer Jólan van der Wiel to create a pair of dresses grown using magnets – find out more about them in our previous story.

“Natural forces like magnetism that are essential to life inspired me to not only use manmade techniques like 3D printing, but to combine technology with the creativity and power of nature itself,” Van Herpen said.

Shown in Paris last month, the Autumn Winter 2013 collection also featured 3D-printed shoes that look like a tangle of roots designed with United Nude founder Rem D Koolhaas and printed by Stratasys.

We’ve featured a few of Van Herpen’s previous collections that include 3D printing and interviewed the fashion designer for our one-off magazine Print Shift, during which she talked about how these technologies could transform the fashion industry.

Recently we posted a collection of 3D-printed jewellery by Dorry Hsu, inspired by her fear of insects.

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Read on for more information sent to us by van Herpen:

Nature is wild. Generated by powerful forces. It proliferates by creating startling beauty.

For her fifth collection as an invited member of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, Iris van Herpen focuses on the forces of nature, with a back and forth between innovation and craftsmanship. Beyond simple visual inspiration, this wonder of the natural world forms the basis of wild experimentation.

With the help of artists, scientists and architects, Iris van Herpen explores the intricacies of these forces trough the medium of fashion, and the sensitive poetics that have long characterised her aesthetic vocabulary.

Through her collaboration with artist Jolan van der Wiel, who has spent several years pondering the possibilities of magnetism, they have created dresses whose very forms are generated by the phenomenon of attraction and repulsion.

Iris van Herpen draws equally upon the life force that pulses through the sculptures of David Altmejd. His wild organic forms derived from the regenerative processes of nature have greatly inspired Wilderness Embodied.

She proposes to reach this wild nature freedom into the human body and soul. The human spirit is forged of this same vital energy, coursing and erupting through the limits of the body in such resplendent displays of extreme tradition or technology as piercings, scarification or surgery.

This wild(er)ness of the human body, as unchecked as it is intimate, is one that the designer has sought to reveal the collection.Balancing respect for the traditions of atelier craftsmanship, with each garment subject to individual handwork, Iris van Herpen has nonetheless broadened the horizons of her domain: materials and processes.

With architect Isaie Bloch and Materialise she continues to develop the innovative 3D-printed dresses, which she was the first to present in both static and flexible forms. On the one hand, her long-term collaboration with Canadian architect Philip Beesley and, on the other had, her partnership with United Nude’s Rem D. Koolhaas and Stratasys which has led to a line of shoes, help to spread the spirit of the collection.

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by Iris van Herpen appeared first on Dezeen.

These 3D-printed accessories by London fashion designer Catherine Wales can be ordered to fit any body shape and printed on demand (+ slideshow).

Wales creates a digital avatar of the prospective wearer using a 3D scanner so each piece can be custom designed and built specifically for their body shape.

“[The idea] started with a message to the industry that we don’t need size labels in our garments,” Wales told Dezeen. “I felt that the fashion industry needed to integrate more techonology to reflect where society was going.”

The Project DNA collection includes a corset with perforations across the bodice to hold elements resembling scaffolding, which connect to spherical joints that can be added to and altered. “I used my pattern-cutting knowledge to change form and accentuate or reduce parts of the body,” said Wales.

A shoulder piece designed to emulate plumage and a mask that frames sections of the face also feature in the range. She created the attire using a combination of engineering programs to model complicated joints and creative software to build the sculptural forms.

Local studio Digits2Widgets provided the equipment to laser sinter the pieces from nylon, which Wales used because “all the joints needed to be flexible.”

The corset, shoulder adornment and horn mask are on display as part of an exhibition with 3D-printing platform Ground3D at the MoBA fashion biennale in Arnhem, the Netherlands. The event is curated by trend forecaster Li Edelkoort and themed Fetishism in Fashion, which continues until 21 July.

“Corsets have been used in that area for centuries,” Wales states. “Restricting and changing the shape of the body through these accessories all fits in with the fetishism theme.”

Earlier today we published a round-up of digital fashion on Dezeen, which includes dresses that squirm when they’re stared at and 3D-printed garments by Iris van Herpen.

Van Herpen spoke to us about how 3D printing is revolutionising the fashion industry in an interview for our print-on-demand magazine Print Shift, predicting that “everybody could have their own body scanned and just order clothes that fit perfectly.”

Photography is by Christine Kreiselmaier.

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More information from the designer follows:

Project DNA is the three-dimensional accessories collection from London-based designer, Catherine Wales. At the helm of the world’s third industrial revolution, Catherine’s debut offering cross-pollinates high fashion, technology and science to re-evaluate conventional methods of garment construction and push the boundaries of digital fabrication within the luxury market.

Inspired by identity and the visual structure of human chromosomes, Project DNA is created almost entirely with individual and interchangeable ball and socket components that allow it to be built in a number of directions. Produced using white nylon with a 3D printer, the eight-piece collection encompasses a scaffolded corset, a blossoming feathered shoulder piece and a waist bracelet complemented by four transformative headpieces that hide key areas of the face; including a guilded horn and a mirrored mask, and a cut out visor helmet.

Catherine’s futuristic collection is completely unique and can be used both editorially to stimulate conceptual thinking and scientifically to develop the capabilities of luxury fashion prototyping within the 3D space.

As an expert pattern cutter, Catherine originally approached Project DNA with a view to sustainably solve the current complications surrounding garment sizing and manufacturing restrictions. In this way, the collection embraces technological developments in order to cut down wastage and better support consumer demand.

Designs can be ordered and printed on demand.

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Catherine Wales appeared first on Dezeen.