Art Through Technology - Huang, Fizel, and the D-Dress

By Mollie Cohen

When most people think of couture fashion they don't think of a piece of software. However, designers Mary Huang and Jenna Fizel have made this a part of the mindset of many fashionistas. They have dubbed the software 'D.dress'.

The 'D' in the software stands for 'delauney triangulation' which is the algorithm that Huang uses to deconstruct each dress into a series of triangular patterns. This app allows the user to draw a dress, turn it into a 3-D model, and export the cutting pattern to make a real dress. The dress is then sized to your measurements and a laser cutter cuts the pattern out of fabric and sews it into the dress.

While the duo is not the first of the fashion industry to use 3-D printing for their designs, they are perhaps the most innovative. Miss Huang realized the issue with most modern day 3-D design software that allowed designers to try to simulate cloth. Instead, she chose to take the opposite approach and design her software around a more computational aspect.

Instead of trying to design dresses to look like flowing cloth, low resolution triangular shapes are used, giving the dress a more avant-garde look. Huang says that this “prompts people to imagine what the resulting dress would look like rather than expect an exact rendition of the screen image.”

With this app, fashion is available to anyone with an Internet connection. With little to no time in the app and sometimes with some completely random scribbles, an entire garment can be made with all the feel of an avant-garde runway.

They have begun calling the software 'computational couture' and they believe that utilizing this new type of technology is the future of fashion. While previously made dresses can be purchased through their label, Continuum, the cutting patterns are downloadable to any computer free of charge for those who would prefer to sew and create their own dresses.

Perhaps standardized sizing will soon be a thing of the past as the fashion of the future takes the industry by storm.