'Dita dress,' a dress designed for Dita Von Teese using the 3D printing technology - which is most often used to create objects and architectural models - makes big noise when it was first shown in a 3D design symposium in New York last March. On June 12, it will be the tour of the West Coast, when one of brains, the designer of costumes and jewellery Michael Schmidt, discusses the dress at an event at the Los Angeles County Museum of art.
The dress, which the base L.A. Schmidt designed with the architect of Brooklyn Francis Bitonti (mainly via Skype, over a period of four months), is a true marriage of fashion and architecture. Bitonti built a digital model of the body of Von Teese Schmidt used to design the garment so that it fit the burlesque performer of Shapeways T., a leader in 3D printing, produced 17 chapters of the dress, which were then assembled by hand before being polished, lacquered and encrusted with over 12,000 Swarovski crystals. With a structure in nylon FishNet almost 3,000 unique connected, the dress is the first fully articulated clothing made using 3D printing.
"Crystals are the heaviest part of the dress," said Schmidt, who adds that the garment of 11.5 pounds "is much lighter that most of the Dita costumes wears on stage". Schmidt, who designed the costumes of Lady Gaga, Rihanna and Madonna, among others, wanted to push the technology and to explore its potential for fashion. The result is a malleable and sensual clothing that moves with the body movement. "I often use mesh and chain mail in my drawings of costumes," he says, "and I was fascinated by the possibility to do something light and fluid out of rigid materials". (Schmidt and Bitonti are planning to continue their collaboration, this time on a collection of 3-d printed jewelry.) And this fall, the dress will be back in New York in "by hand," an exhibition of digital design at the Museum of Arts and Design.