3. Circular Open Source Fashion¶
Week 3. Lot of expectations after I completed the assignment of Week 2. I was really proud of the final result and I wanted to keep this motivation for this new assignment. The week started with the lecture of Zoe, which I loved, and it really inspired me. I understood how different actors are involved in the fashion industry starting from the design up to the production of the piece itself. It was impressive to see how the environmental issued are the least important and now are starting to be important as well.
For this week’s project I follow the weekly advice: TIP of the WEEK: Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple
Inspiration¶
Zoe inspired me when she showed the creation from Takehiro Ando which consisted in small pieces that could create big things! Same as the film Big hero 6, that starting from nanobots, bigger constructions could result. I wanted to do this.
Then, she talked about hacking the fashion industry and oneness definition , and this subject really moved me and I also wanted to this.
• Look who are your allies instead of seeing who are your competitors
It is really interesting though how by thinking from the initial design , you can obtain beautiful clothes thinking sustainable aiming to obtain zero wate.
Modeling and Fabrication¶
But it was when I saw a friend who had a bag from Botigga Venetta when I finally matched all the pieces and defined what would be my project for this week: I wanted to create a small bag for elegant parties, sustainable, with similar patterns as my friend’s bag, built from seamless pieces and available for laser cut as open source.
Then, Ana sent us a paper “The Exploration of the Modular System in Textile and Apparel Design”1 by Chanjuan Chen, and I defined that the shape of my pieces would be hexagonal as if the shape that would produce zero waste when cutting the pieces. I Followed the same cuts as shown in the image.
Then I made two prototypes: One with Square shape and another with hexagonal shape:
Both models worked but at the end, to obtain a closer result to the Fashion Brand, I selected the square shape and built the prototype of the bag with paper pieces to see a small version of how it would look the bag, and I loved the result.
I started creating the pattern in Rhino, being careful with the duplicated lines and that all the lines were connected. And this was the first prototype I laser cut 2.
Settings: The material I selected was 3mm thickness black neoprene and the parameters for laser cut were Power: 20, Speed: 1 and PPI/Hz: 1000.
The pieces were effectively cut with Zero waste and they assembled perfectly. However, with this large cuts within the pieces, the bonding was not strong and it would not support the weight of a phone or a wallet. Therefore I changed the design of the pieces with smaller cuts of the holes and larger borders of the tips.
To manufature this small bag I used a 3mm thickness black neoprene sheet of 40cm x 40cm
The result was amazing and based on this I started to make the bag!!!!!
At the end, the bag was not stable enough, and taking advantage of the configuration of modular pieces, I used a double layer of pieces at the bottom and two additional pieces at the center of each front face, and now I had finished my bag!
Finally, to take advantage of the configuration of pieces I had already laser cut, I thought that I could make different designs of the same bag using the same pieces in different sizes. At the end the result were incredible as I created a long cured, a hand bag and hand free bag, 3 different models of bag using one 1 configuration of pieces. At the end, you could produce infinite possibilities of bags by mixing different materials, colors and sizes using this standard shape of piece available at the bottom of this website :)😊
At the end, I am proud of my work and I am proud that I am more confident using Rhino and the laser cut in. Once Again, Petra and Ana, thank you for your support and advices!✌
