In yesterday's post we looked at knits designed for the D-house project by Dyloan incorporating Stratasys technology. The design studio replicated this project in collaboration with Stratasys also for a mini-collection of accessories presented at the latest edition of the Lineapelle leather fair in Milan.
Students from the Italian Accademia di Costume e Moda, located in Rome and Milan, presented a series of ambitious ideas that incoporated leather and 3D printed technologies.
Moving from foldable footwear ideas developed in the last few years, Nicola Silja Haßlacher created the "fold shoe", a design devised to minimize leather off-cut waste. The frame of the shoe, its sole and its 3D printed skeleton are basically just one piece, in this way material components are reduced, while this flexible design can be made on demand in just a few hours, so that material stocks are better used and distributed.
Elisa Simonetti focused instead on bags: inspired by Japanese small stone Jizo statues resembling a Buddhist monk and believed to be the guardians of children and travelers, the designer created two compact bags.
Nature and in particular birches with their trunks strewn with knots in the shapes of eyes inspired Simonetti a three-dimensional motif that was 3D-printed around the handle of the bag. The resulting designs vaguely look like mysterious owls, magical ancient creatures or small totems from an enchanted forest.
Caren Meirle's bags move instead from topography: the designer recreated on the leather bags 3D printed topographical maps.
The most intriguing thing about these bags is that, topographical maps are flat renditions of something that is three-dimensional and, by using 3D printing, Meirle managed to recreate the original structure of specific terrains and bring the maps back to life. The result is interesting as the topographic configurations in bright shades emerge from the soft leather.
Inspired by Pop Art, Azzurra came up with the "Pica" and "Mati" bags – two designs that seem to move from Andy Warhol's famous painted portraits.
Two panels forming colourful faces with 3D printed pins are recreated on the handbags and their straps is also made with a chain formed by a series of colourful 3D printed elements.
These designs may just be prototypes, but they show us the possibilities offered by advanced 3D printing techniques like Stratasys' Polyjet 3D printing and you can be sure that, while in these cases they are applied to new pieces, some of these motifs may be used in future to revamp and reinvent also old pieces or goods from previous collections that usually (and shamefully) luxury houses prefer to destroy rather than sell.
