Feature Friday No. 5 – Fashion Tech Berlin

Last week was an amazing new experience for us when we took part in Fashion Tech Berlin hosted by Premium. This was part of Fashion week here in the German capital. There was a lot of preparation going on at DimensionAlley and at Bikini Berlin behind the scenes. We were transformed into an Atelier. It all started with a research workshop day where we tried out 3D printing directly on different materials like Tulle, silk, leather and cotton. Pro-tipp: we found the silk was the easiest to print onto!

Together with Berlin wearable electronics fashion house Electrocouture we created 3D prints directly onto the leather. Lisa Lang, CEO of Elektrocouture, had some really inspiring but challenging ideas that we were delighted to realise in 3D Print. Fishscales printed in flexible TPU black rubber like material? How about sound waves converted into a height map?  We printed onto the leather directly using the TPU to bond the first few layer and then changed to black PLA to allow us to print strong and stable up to 10cm high. Yep, we managed it and the results are breathtaking. Here you can see them shown onto the Berlin based design houses concept piece “Lovra Lights” light wings designed to be worn by for the lady DJ.

Fashion Tech Berlin took place on 20th Jan. at the Kuhlhaus Berlin. With over 2000 visitors the event with talks was totally sold out. We had a stand demoing 3d printers from Sharebot including the high detailed resin printer Voyager. We were fortunate to get some lovely designs from Stilnest to print on the Voyager.

Fashion direct from machines

We took part with Elektrocouture, local designers and Tortec laser cutters to cut and engrave a purple velvet top seamed together using 3D printed buttons with a Ziggy Stardust lightning bolt motiv made by us.

Feel free to download the .stl of the bolt button on thingiverse if you want to print it yourself!

Our pièce-de-resistance was a concept top made entirely from 3d printed material (Flexible TPU, sponsored by Sharebot Italy). The end effect was quite rubber like and flexible and supsingly easy to work with. We used TPU filament to tie the top. Gingerlee at DimensionAlley created the pattern using photoshop, we ran our the material prints over the weekend on the XXL printer and Gingerlee cut out the pattern and stitched it together. I just love combining different techniques, old and new.

Let us know what you think about 3D print and fashion. See you next week.