Aug 10, 2015 | By Alec
While 3D printed outfits and accessories have been steadily appearing on fashion runways throughout the world, the challenge with 3D printed clothes has always been comfort and flexibility. How do you 3D print something that is as wearable as a cotton shirt and also looks great? While designers everywhere have been wrestling with that challenge, three students from the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering developed a very interesting solution: the POSEIDON, a flexible garment that features more than 600 interconnected movable scales, like the skin of a shark that will protect the wearer from all elements.
The garment was developed as part of a Computational Fashion Master Class taught in 2014, where a group of leading fashion designers, engineers and media artists taught students how the latest digital and additive manufacturing technologies could be applied to the world of fashion. It was also co-organized by Shapeways. The three students behind this interesting shark skin garment are Canadian fashion designer Hillary Sampliner (with her own label Ruth Weil), Georgia student Andréa van Hintum (student at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta) and industrial designer Billy Dang (student at Tisch School of the Arts NYU).
Together, they set out to develop a 3D printable garment that functions as an extension or augmentation of the human body. These concepts revolve around adding something extra to the wearer, as a type of second skin that can respond to certain shapes, pressures or environmental conditions. What they came up with is a very interesting suit of flexible and body-hugging ‘armor’. ‘Poseidon is a wearable 3D printed garment that can move with the body in a fluid manner. Inspired by shark skin denticles, Poseidon resembles a protective exoskeleton that guards the wearer from the elements,’ they say.
'We wanted to create something that was movable and flexible, but also had something of a rigid structure – so kind of soft and hard mixed together,’ Hillary explains their project at the unveiling. This amazing garment essentially moves alongside your own body, and can be used to protect you from external pressures. Applications include just about any position where people are faced with potential bodily harm. ‘Hopefully, someday, it will be used in the tech industry and you’ll be wearing it,’ Hillary added.
But perhaps most remarkable is that this piece has been 3D printed as a single object, despite the more than 600 different and movable scales. ‘We really wanted to take advantage of the 3D Printing process. With 3D printing, you can print different sizes, complicated parts all interconnected; all on one shot. You can’t really match that with any other manufacturing process,’ Billy Dang added. While that must’ve been a hellish project to design, the final and very impressive garment was 3D printed with the help of Shapeways.
Posted in 3D Printing Applications
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