When digital environments create new fashion aesthetics: “Living Clothes” collection from Alice Ziccheddu
I am very delighted to see designers who are more and more interested into the digital fabrication of clothes.
Softwares created for clothes simulations already exist since quite a long time ( couldn’t say the exact year), but the method they imply reproduces exactly the one used in the physical world: first the design of patterns, then their application on a 3D body and textile simulation.
These softwares are designed to facililate fashion industries time production, but never to engender new aesthetics. This happens ( I think) because of the lack of collaboration between ingeneers and creatives.
But now fashion designers understand the huge potential of digital tools, especially 3D softwares, for the creation of new fashion paradigms.
This is the case with Alice Zicchedu, who, for her diploma collection, designed clothes first imagined in a digital 3D environment. In her website, she describes the collection as follows: The dress is virtually created around the body using a 3D software in order to reproduce textures and volumes belongings to the natural world, particularly to the mineral world. The mimesis of natural structures through digital processing leads to the creation of hybrid clothes. She also collaborated with argentinian 3D environment designer Carolina Travi who put some pictures of the creative process in her website:
The clothes are designed on 3Ds Max, a software that I know quite well. The bulk of the garments are not constructed as fluid materials but solids, which, in a way, facilitate their digital conception. I don’t think the bodies are animated, because it is extremely difficult to simulate a 3D object attached to the body, besides fluid mechanical properties.
However, what I would like to know is if the volumes are then flattened in order to allow the making of the patterns, or if the patterns are directly designed on the volumes… that would be interesting to know (even if I would pitch on the first assumption).
Once the garments are physically constructed, Ziccheddu incorporates sensors and microprocessors to make them interactive, sensing and reacting to their environment.
Juliette Sallin
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