Can a single jacket be all things to all people? Of course not, but perhaps a single jacket design could be all things to all fisherman. A Japanese company called Mountain Research has developed this “Phishing Hoody,” which at its core is simply a hooded vest:
But by adding removeable sleeves and a variety of extensions, the user can make the jacket longer or shorter, and choose pocket styles based on the gear they’ll be carrying that day.
Unveiled at their Paris Fashion Week runway show, Chanel’s build out turned a lot of heads. Their hottest Fall/Winter looks? Food labels. The show was held at the beautiful and unsupermarketlike Grand Palais and featured 500 products with creative CC branding. The requisite model action took place throughout the mock supermarket, as sneakered supermodels perused and posed among the sadly not-for-market options.
These clever (fashion) house brand labels were convincing and appropriate. The idea of sleeping, breathing and eating fashion certainly isn’t foreign to the dedicated. Can you imagine Trader Joe’s adding an impeccable fashion design wing to the enterprise? I think it’s a perfect idea. You trust them with your cheese, dried fruit and dish soap, why not your handbags? Here are a few of our favorites:
We’ve come quite a long way from the speculative design of decade’s past
Speculative design has long served to illustrate the future and push the frontier of reality, and we’re proud to include it as a category in our Design Awards. In fact, last year’s winner Extrapolation Factory perfectly captures the kind of uncanny valley of near-future concepts that encourage us to reflect on the present.
We recently caught wind of two speculative designs that we deemed worth sharing. Who knows—maybe they’ll show up in our 2014 Awards program.
No one really likes commuting (except maybe those who have readily accepted “Tube Games” into their daily routine). We might temporarily curb our discontent with a few minutes buried in a good book, slowly head-bobbing to music or eyeing the cute straphanger across the train. It doesn’t push past the fact that no one likes being crammed into a sweaty sardine can with a crowd of groggy people on their way to work.
If anyone has come even remotely close to making that scenario the least bit enjoyable, it’s industrial designer Siew Ming Cheng. She’s put together a commuter get-up that’ll keep even the bravest of morning riders at bay. Just make sure you aren’t on the receiving end.
Last week, Levi Strauss & Company announced their Wellthread initiative, “A sustainable design and production process that benefits consumers, apparel workers and the environment.” Now we just have to figure out what the heck that process consists of—the press release [PDF] is filled with corpo-speak like this:
By embedding the creative constraints of sustainability into the design process from the start, the company has unlocked innovation and business value in the form of a more efficient and flexible production process. “The design mind is still delighted by these creative challenges that are put to it. But if we put these guardrails on the activity, it actually has tremendous unlock in terms of business potential,” says Paul Dillinger, Senior Director of Design at Dockers Brand.
By digging through the announcement’s catchphrases, this is what we think Wellthread consists of, on the design front:
Design for Durability. “Turning past experience into future promise, a journey into the Levi Strauss & Co. archives uncovered the key points of stress that demanded reinforcement—from buttonholes to pockets.” That’s all the detail provided on that matter, but we assume it means they’ll design garments with more stitching in those areas.
Anticipating the Rise of Clothing Recycling. This part is a little more clear: Although clothing recycling isn’t currently anywhere near as large an industry as plastic and metals recycling are, Levi’s is betting it will be in the future, and is incorporating “an innovative new long-staple yarn designed to hold up through the recycling process without sacrificing the strength of the cloth.” Presumably their designers have been educated on how to incorporate this new material into the design of new garments.
Modifying Consumer Behavior Through Design. Garments with the Wellthread stamp will apparently have laundry instructions specifying cold water, and the garments themselves will have “added touches such as locker loops on khakis and overlapped fabric at the shoulder seam of t-shirts to encourage hang drying,” these things intended to make individual consumers use less energy. We’re not sure those things will be enough to change consumer behavior on their own; there will likely be some education and marketing required to drive this point home.
The manufacturing changes of Wellthread are a little easier to understand:
Photos by Amélie-Antoinette Tegtmeyer
Talk of the apocalypse never goes out of style (we’re guilty as charged, from timely essays to lighter fare, not to mention our 2011 Gift Guide), and we’ve just found the ultimate survival fashion. French designer Marie-Elsa Batteux Flahault has created a jumpsuit with the ‘Prepper’—someone who is actively preparing for the end of the world—in mind. And it’s not suited for one sole “end of the world as we know it” scenario. The jacket is fully equipped to defend against all variety of survivalist situation and elemental attack, from starvation and dehydration to water-based natural disasters and extreme temperatures.
Lost at sea after a nautical travesty? The jacket also comes fully stocked with signaling devices. Zombies or rabid animals at your heels? It comes equipped with a knife-like defense mechanism in the right sleeve and first aid supplies, arguably for when you accidentally engage that sleeve knife on yourself. If you look closely, there are instructions printed on the jacket in case apocalyptic panic takes over in your moment of need.
This project is titled “We Are on the Edge” and “is a projection in a dystopian world where prepping becomes trendy and gets integrated in the design DNA of everyday life products,” as Flahault says. “The jacket serves as an illustration of this prediction; a fashionable outfit suitable for everyday use but which also possess the features needed during a doomsday scenario.”
Check out the video below to see the jacket in action. It’s surprisingly form-fitting for all of the utility it carries.
Regular readers of Core are likely aware that we’re big fans of local clothiers Outlier. Founded on their mutual interest in designing cycling clothes disguised as regular ones—think slacks and button-ups—Abe Burmeister and Tyler Clemens joined forces in 2008 to create a pair of pants; their first shirt came the following year. By combining performance-oriented materials with contemporary tailoring—check out the case study on their dungarees—they’ve outgrown the bike-commuter niche and it’s safe to say they’re now making some of the best garments on the market today (I’ve said it before, but I basically live in three-way shorts during the summer).
Working with longtime collaborator Emiliano Granado, they’ve recently produced a video of their patent-pending ‘pivot sleeve,’ which happened to be another candidate for the case study, if not for the fact that there is actually IP at stake. “The Patent Pending Pivot Sleeve was born trying to solve what we thought was an isolated problem, but the solution turned out to have far wider uses. It’s quite simply a button up shirt designed to give you a wider range of motion, and in the process it also manages to both fit and stay in place better as well.”
We wanted to create a dress shirt using traditional non-stretch shirting fabrics that didn’t bind at the shoulders and across the back when we leaned forward on our bikes. We studied everything we could get our hands on, various tailored shirts, mountain climbing jackets and even the gear that George Mallory used in his fatal yet stylish attempt to summit Mount Everest in the 1920’s. Ironically we probably learned the most from a couple overpriced high fashion shirts we bought on clearance in the depth of the financial crisis of 2008.
It took them a year of experimentation to create “something that was genuinely new (at least to the extent of our knowledge and research),” for which they were able to file a patent. At first glance, it simply looks like an extra side panel for a dress shirt… but try on one for size (Open Studio every Friday afternoon!) and it’s hard not to be impressed by the subtle but noticeable improvement to range of motion.
A one piece sleeve that flows seamlessly into the back of the garment, creating a rear side panel in the process. The pattern piece for the sleeve becomes L-shaped. At the critical pivot point at the shoulder the fabric lies on the bias, naturally stretching exactly where it is most useful. Removing the rear arm seam prevents the shirt from both binding across the back and pulling untucked when you move your arms, so you both look sharper and are more comfortable. Finally the rear side panels allow for a much more refined shaping of the shirt than traditional constructions. A dress shirt designed to look better, fit better and allow you to move without restriction.
The new Air-Forged Oxford, which features the sleeve, has nearly sold out since they introduced it yesterday; curious to learn more about how it came to be, I reached out to Abe, who pointed me to a making-of documentary from ’09…
     |
For her Master’s thesis in the Design Products program at the Royal College of Art, Jule Waibel cleverly employed the multiple meanings of her native language, German: Entfaltung may be translated as “unfold,” “expand” or “develop,” all of which describe the collection of three items that comprise the project. “Collapsible structures reflect how our world is constantly changing,” she writes. “My response is to use folding as part of my design process.”
A particular folding technique can transform simple sheet materials into three-dimensional objects, with the additional capability that they can expand and contract. [The] dress [that] changes its shape according to the movement of the body, an expandable bag and an umbrella are all made of Tyvek®, a lightweight water- and tear-proof synthetic paper.
And although the results express the simple metaphor with geometric elegance, Waibel cited a surprising—albeit equally fantastical—source of inspiration: Mary Poppins and her magical bag. Captivated by the way “everything seems to fit inside—a mirror, a hatstand, a plant…” she set out to design a bag that shows “the minimum and maximum possibilities.” The umbrella embodies “the beauty and aesthetics of folding,” while the dress illustrates transformation, motion and flexibility “in a playful way.”
| |
I’m aware there’s no real rivalry between the fields of industrial design and fashion design, and with friends in the latter profession it would be rude of me to publicly admit I think ill of that industry; but I can freely say we ID’ers are probably envious of their budgets. So yes, it’s with a certain amount of glee that I report the hacking of Vogue UK’s website.
Some code whiz with a strange sense of humor has rendered extra, dinosaur-based functionality onto their homepage. As of press time, when you visit Vogue’s site and use your keyboard to type in this sequence…
Up, up, down down, left right, left, right, B, A
…and then you keep hitting “A,” you get an awesome parade of dinosaurs—velociraptors, I think—wearing an assortment of fee-yancy little hats.
If the hacker responsible is reading this and targets us next, please don’t give us anything so tacky; we’d like velociraptors lounging in Eames chairs.
| |
The hybrid fashion label/experimental design lab, Continuum Fashion, was first on our radar for their 3D printed bikini manufactured with Shapeways in 2011. Since the initial buzz, the design duo Jenna Fizel and Mary Huang have expanded into software, giving design power directly to the user to create their own garment.
With projects like the Diatom’s SketchChair floating around, made-to-order furniture and fashion seem to be carving out their own unique—and maybe even affordable—place in the design world. Continuum’s CONSTRVCT and D.dress software gives pretty much anyone a creative platform and foolproof software to act as their own fashion designer with no assembly (or drawing skills) required.
The fashion industry, like ID, is no stranger to digital fabrication—particularly with the rising fame of Iris van Herpen, the 3D printing hype is flowing directly onto the runway. With the D.Dress software, the guesswork is taken out of the avant-garde dress making completely. The CAD-savvy might recognize the D.dress’s triangulated surface structure as a consideration more for ease of outputting quick .stl files than either aesthetics or sewing. To Continuum’s credit,however, they make a good case that “the triangulation also ensures that almost any drawing will produce an interesting form, and in fact produces good meshes from mere scribbles.”
| |
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
