6 | Project¶
ENDLESS SUNSET - A digital fashion design project
Endless Sunset is a digital fashion design project. At the intersection of physical and virtual, it showcases wearable solar cells through an aesthetic craft and digital textile library and a digital outfit.
More than a simple digital fashion production, it's a design fiction project. It's contextualized in the near future and plays with fiction boundaries. It imagines futures, fantasizes about it, in order to create reactions, debates and to discover new design experiences.
Presentation¶
To me digital design allows many new possibilities. It's a great way to make progress on some issues from the fashion industry. As a textile designer, I don't want to be part of the fashion system as we know it today. So, with time, I became interested in design fiction. Digital fashion allows me to develop more narrative fashion projects and to find new innovative fashion experiences.
In addition, during my researches, this year, I discovered wearable design and solar design. More specifically, I discovered OPV, a flexible, transparent and personnalisable solar cells. I saw in this new technology many possibilities. Inspired by the work of Pauline Van Dogen and Marjian Van Obel, two amazing solar designers, that apply the solar energy in our daily lives, I wanted to explore the properties of this solar material with my point of view and my expertise of textile design.
That's why, the heart of my project is the sun. I decided to focus on this notion to develop a digital textile collection and an outfit allowing to imagine different applications, different textile associations and play with textures and materialities. This is a design fiction project and contextualised in a fictional future.
So, let's fly to 2042 !
Video¶
About my process :
Endless Sunset - Creative process from Julie Merlino on Vimeo.
I defined the project guideline around two points : - "Play with the sun" : with shadows / solar waves / reflexions ... - OPV properties : flexible / transparent / colored / personalisable
My research drove me to develop a phygital process at the intersection of craft and digital experimentation.
The physical experimentation part allows me to test different materials in real life and to define my textile library (I used vinyle, waxed, and reflective materials). In my opinion, it's important to have a careful point of view of our reality, our environment, to know the senses and features of our world. Thanks to this expertise and knowledge of our real life, digitalization can be useful.
After that, I hybridized physical experimentations and digital productions to create a dialogue between real and virtual. I switched between several dimensions. Sometimes I used digital process to create in real life, and then I switched again in digital dimension, and sometimes I reproduced my craft experimentations in the digital space.
Morever, thanks to parametric design I generated some patterns inspired of sun waves and I reproduced solar cells.
After this production part, I finally defined a solar textile library digitized with different colours, textures, prints and transparencies.
And I was able to test a first outfit. The goal of this shape was to combine and assemble materials and colours on a body. The idea was to experimente overlay, opacity, transparency and animate these textures to see the movement.
About the final outfit I'm not really convinced, I think I could have gone further in the modeling. I have many idea to improve this projet, but at this point, I think the important is how I brought life to these materials, renders and applications.
To conclude, about the continuation : I'd like to develop my research about phygital process, the real and virtual relationships, and exploring the different possibilities that offer digital fashion design. And combine that, as much as possible, with my interest for the innovative materials. In the futur, I wish to co-create with designers and offer them digitization of innovative textile projects. To show how digital fashion is a good way to imagine new possibilities and new design experiences.
In addition I'd like continue my documentation and my research about solar design.
I want to say a special thanks to the Fabricademy team and Le Textile Lab team, this journay was an amazing experience, I'm so grateful.
