Archive for the 'Drawn Dress' Category

We are proud to announce the release of the ‘Drawn Dress’ project.  To learn more and see the entire project, please go to the Drawn Dress Page.

To accom­pany the dig­i­tal body scan, we decided to go all ‘dig­i­tal’ for phase 2 of the ‘Drawn Dress’ project.  Here is an ani­ma­tion for your enjoy­ment of Wes and his Robot cut­ting the cus­tom dress geometries.

For the archi­tect, the dig­i­tal era has trans­formed the process of design and fab­ri­ca­tion, fuel­ing the fire of rebel­lion against the stan­dard­ized con­struc­tion unit.  Today, the archi­tect dreams of effi­cient trans­for­ma­tions, para­met­ric con­straints, and devel­opable sur­faces… bor­row­ing, often­times reck­lessly, sar­to­r­ial tech­niques and lan­guage from the fash­ion indus­try – dart­ing, drap­ing, pat­tern­ing.  Why then do architect’s con­tem­po­raries in fash­ion design still sur­round them­selves with dress forms and work tables?  There is a clear dis­con­nect between the meth­ods of work­ing and the moments of progress within the respec­tive fields.  The fash­ion indus­try still split between made to mea­sure cou­ture and the prêt-a porter S-M-L-XL and numer­i­cally coded stan­dard­ized sizes.  This archi­tec­tural ref­er­ence is iron­i­cally bet­ter suited for the mass cus­tomiza­tion boom.  Susan Ashdown’s research at Cor­nel Uni­ver­sity into 3D body scan­ning has demon­strated that our con­ven­tional under­stand­ing of stan­dard siz­ing for gar­ments is anti­quated[1].  When viewed in com­par­i­son, the archi­tec­ture field and the fash­ion indus­try have become uniquely suc­cess­ful at processes the alter­nate field strug­gles to get right.  This syn­ergy is seem­ingly appar­ent and use­ful; how­ever, lit­tle inter­ac­tion occurs at the ped­a­gog­i­cal level beyond super­fi­cial dis­cus­sions and con­cep­tual leaps.   As Archi­tects take this oppor­tu­nity to reflect on how the dig­i­tal process has affected their prac­tice, we have the opor­tu­nity to engage a sim­i­lar process that has yet to take the dig­i­tal leap.

Charged with the task of design­ing, devel­op­ing, and con­struct­ing a dig­i­tally drawn dress, this com­par­a­tive process serves as a cat­a­lyst to rar­ify archi­tec­tures con­tri­bu­tion in the dig­i­tal era.  By select­ing the “strap­less dress” typol­ogy we are able to engage two oppos­ing forces at once — fit and vol­ume.   A set of five mea­sure­ments are first drawn from the client and trans­lated into dig­i­tal curves.  These curves gen­er­ate the sur­face of the body, defin­ing the irre­ducible mea­sure­ments required for the dress to func­tion.  While these steps could be con­sid­ered auto­mated with a dig­i­tal body scan­ner, the act of tak­ing key mea­sure­ments, either from a dig­i­tal scan or a phys­i­cal per­son, has proved to be an impor­tant engage­ment with the his­tory of gar­ment fab­ri­ca­tion.  This next step, while dig­i­tal, is any­thing but auto­mated.  Pro­vided with the avatar, the designer mod­els a sil­hou­ette sur­face and con­structs a sys­tem, decom­pos­ing the com­pounded sur­face into devel­opable sur­faces by extract­ing the seam loca­tions.  In this dig­i­tal world, seams need not fall in con­ven­tional loca­tions or trace the dress form.  These darts, seams, and folds are capa­ble of man­i­fest­ing any design as long as the geo­met­ric prin­ci­ples at play are in tact.  When these sur­faces unroll into their 2d pro­files they main­tain their poten­tial energy to re-manifest them­selves in the 3d phys­i­cal form once sewn back in place.  As opposed to sim­ply tri­an­gu­lat­ing a body scan, this process embraces a reci­procity between draw­ing and con­struc­tion and by doing so pushes processes beyond the sequences found in the divided fields of archi­tec­ture and fashion.

[1] Susan Ash­down, Ready-to-Wear, http://bodyscan.human.cornell.edu/scenefa6b.html (April 2009)