Circular Open Source Fashion

Zoe Romano introduce us into the systems behind fashion and the textile industry. The focus was on alternative systems such as circular fashion, agile fashion and open value chains.

Our Assigment was:

“The students will have to design and fabricate a modular reconfigurable system or

seamless garments. The soft connection can be designed to be implemented in the

assembly of a garment, being applied on the seams or it can be designed as single

elements that act as construction parts of a garment.”

I really love the assignment of this week. I was excited to create a surface out of geometrical pieces because it enables to work with completely different ures. We started our assignment manually - with paper and pen.

I was inspired by a natural pattern. Scales of a fish.

I had this idea right in the beginning but it took me some time to come from the shape of a fish scale to an how an interlocking pattern.

After some several tries on paper and chats with my team mates, I came to a model which is a creative interpretation of a fish scale. But I really liked it and therefore I was curious how it will look like in Rhinoceros.

I transferred my draft from paper into the program Rhinoceros. I used one quarter, two circles and freehand lines as the fundamental geometric figures. I got rid of the redundant lines with the function: 'trim' and grouped the whole figure to determine the scale of 4×7 cm.

I the first run I decided to use synthetic leather. The settings for the laser cutter for synthetic leather is:

• Speed: 50% Power: 45% Frequency: 50%

After a successful cut we chose jeans as the next material. The settings for jeans are:

• Speed: 40% Power: 65 % Frequency: 50% (for precise cutting with jeans it might be better to increase the power because otherwise
  the edgings will be damaged and the fabric dissolves itself.)