Soft/Mesh was a dress where 3d-printing and embroidered mesh were combined to a fashion statement. Olga Sjöroos, a very talented student of Aalto ARTS designed and constructed (sew) the dress.
The point here was not to design something “designed-to-a-specific-purpose” 3D-print. We wanted to create fabric-like 3D-print, so that the actual printed material would have to be cut and used as a fabric.
…which was very much against the whole idea of having a 3D-printer. 3D-printers excel at specific, made for purpose parts. Here, it was used as generator for an easy to discard source material, which could be cut, sewn and used without thinking about the purpose BEFORE printing. Generic prints without a specific purpose. This was complemented with embroidered mesh-fabric, and all prints and embroideries together created the dress, and nothing else.
I designed the 3d-print patterns with Olga, managed the printing process and embroidering, and Olga did the hard work, designing embroidery patterns and sewing her design together.
One of the biggest issues was that the 3D-printed material was not so durable. We solved that problem later.
The work was presented at Smart Textile Salon in Gent, in 2013.