Let's face it: a programme made to create animation and modelling for 3D printing such as open source Blender can easily turn into a very addictive tool. If you've ever tried playing around with one of such programmes, you know how extruding elements, elongating selected vertices and turning them into pointy spikes and multiplying faces to create bizarre formations from a basic geometrical figure can turn into a terrific addiction even at amateur level.
But what would happen if the same principles - say extruding elements and creating spiky shapes - was applied to a real dress developed with fabric and not with conventional 3D printing materials? Peter Pilotto provided an answer during London Fashion Week.
Apparently the main inspiration behind the bright palette for Peter Pilotto's A/W 13 collection came from Spanish Renaissance painters and in particular from El Greco.
Spain was echoed in the cropped matador jackets in red and yellow with a boxy silhouette that opened the collection, while the more arty elements such as brushstrokes were reinterpreted in bright prints and intricate embroideries.
Digital prints prevailed, though, over more classic forms of art: kaleidoscopic prints are very predictable motifs on any Peter Pilotto and Christopher De Vos' runway, and this time they were interpreted at their best in cropped quilted puffer jackets that, paired with skirts in matching colours, are already considered as the fave items of the next autumnal season by many fans of the design duo.
Yet this time there was something else apart from the trademark maxi-maximalist digital prints: the dress construction. Silhouettes were often characterised by spiky hems or sculpted elements that called to mind the main basic functions of modelling programmes for 3D printers (play with Blender, then look at the elongated hems of some of the skirts and you'll get an idea).
In a way it was as if Pilotto and De Vos took a simple basic dress silhouette and started playing with it on Blender, elongating one hem, altering another, slashing it here, chopping it there.
The result in some cases looked futuristic, though in others you got the impression that rigid panels of fabric had been wrapped around the body and this created a risky situation - that of caging a woman in a geometrically futuristic form (fashion historians here will remember how Capucci was originally accused of having confined women in his rigid boxed line).
The other problem was that, while these designs were pretty new from this point of view, others such as roomy coats looked almost shapeless in their exaggeratedly oversized forms, maybe proving that the duo is well versed in digital tools but lacks some tailoring skills.
Who knows if these silhouettes will now reappear in other collections and if specific programmes currently employed for 3D printing - the obsessive mania of the moment - will enter fashion and change it.
If this happens we will have new developments in the reinvention of the female shape and body: in the last few years we have seen a robotisation of women or the female body being employed as a canvas on which to project fantastically bright digital prints.
Yet Blender and other similar programmes move from geometric principles and basic geometric forms, so the next step may be a "geometrisation" of the female body. And while the design duo managed to inject in their garments the proper degree of dynamism that other collections were lacking, it's only natural to wonder if geometrisation processes will be developed further and if they will genuinely be able to enhance the body of ordinary women of all shapes and ages and not just that of beautiful young models.
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