3D Printed Fashion: From Home Design to the Downloadable Future of Style

Carefully selected 100 classic TED Talks, each lasting 8-15 minutes, covering innovation, growth, and future trends. Provides MP3 online playback, download, and English transcripts to help you improve your listening and speaking. Use the power of ideas to ignite your passion for learning! Here is this issue’s 【TED】 collection of 100 classic talks for oral English and listening practice. Keep accumulating, and make your English closer to real life!

In the past few months I've been traveling for weeks at a time with only one suitcase of clothes. One day I was invited to an important event and I wanted to wear something special and new for it. So I looked through my suitcase and I couldn't find anything to wear. I was lucky to be at the technology conference that day and had access to 3D printers. So I quickly designed a skirt on my computer and I loaded a file on the printers, just printing the pieces overnight. The next morning I just took all the pieces, assembled it together in my hotel room and this is actually the skirt that I'm wearing right now. So it wasn't the first time that I printed clothes. For my senior collection in fashion design school I decided to try and 3D print an entire fashion collection from my home. The problem was that I barely knew anything about 3D printing and I had only 9 months to figure out how to print 5 fashionable looks.

I always felt most creative when I worked from home. I loved experimenting with new materials and I always tried to develop new techniques to make the most unique textiles for my fashion projects. I loved going to old factories and weird stores in search of leftovers of strange powders and weird materials and then bringing them home to experiment on. As you can probably imagine my roommates didn't like that at all. So I decided to move on to working with big machines once they didn't fit in my living room. I loved the exact and the custom work I could do with all kinds of fashion technologies like knitting machines and laser cutting and silk printing.

One summer break I came here to New York for an internship at a fashion house in Chinatown. We worked on two incredible dresses that were 3D printed. They were amazing like you can see here. But they had a few issues with them. They were made from hard plastics and that's why they were very breakable. The models couldn't sit with them and they even got scratched from the plastics on their arms. With 3D printing the designers had so much freedom to make the dresses look exactly like they wanted. But still they were very dependent on big and expensive industrial printers that were located in a lab far from their studio.

Later that year, Frank gave me a 3D printed necklace printed using a home printer. I knew that these printers are much cheaper and much more accessible than the ones we used at my internship. So I looked at the necklace and then I thought if I can print a necklace from home, why not print my clothes from home too? I really liked the idea that I wouldn't have to go to the market and pick fabrics as someone else chose to sell. I could just design them and print them directly from home. I found a small maker space where I learned everything I know about 3D printing. They literally gave me the key to the lab so I could experiment into the night every night. The main challenge was to find the right filament for printing clothes with.

So it is a filament. Filament is the material you feed a printer with and I spent months experimenting with PLA which is a hard and scratchy, breakable material. The breakthrough came when I was introduced to filaflex which is a new kind of filament. It is strong yet very flexible and with it I was able to print the first garment, the red jacket that had the word liberty, freedom in French embedded into it. I chose this word because I felt so empowered and free when I could just design a garment from my home and then print it by myself. And actually you can easily download this jacket and easily change the word to something else, for example your name or your sweetheart's name.

So the printer was small so I had to piece all the garments together just like a puzzle. And I wanted to solve another challenge. I wanted to print textile that I would use just like a regular fabric. That's when I found an open source file from an architect to design a pattern that I loved and with it I was able to print a beautiful textile that I would use just like a regular fabric. It actually even looks a little bit like lace. So I took his file and I modified it and changed it, played with many different versions of it. And I needed to print another 5,900 more hours to complete printing my collection. So I brought six printers to my home and just printed 24-7. And this is actually a really slow process but let's remember the internet was significantly slower 20 years ago. So 3D printing will also accelerate and in no time you'll be able to print a t-shirt in your home in just a couple of hours or even minutes.

So you guys, you want to see how it looks like? So Rebecca is wearing one of my five outfits. Almost everything here she's wearing I printed from my home. One of her shoes is printed. Thank you Rebecca. Thank you guys. So thinking the future material will evolve and they will look and feel like fabrics we know today like cotton or silk. Imagine personalized clothes that fit exactly to your measurements. Music was once a very physical thing. You would have to go to the record shop and buy CDs. But now you can just download digital music directly to your phone. Fashion is also a very physical thing and I wonder how our world will look when our clothes become digital just like this skirt is. Thank you so much.