Kinematics Dress

Composed of thousands of unique interlocking components, each dress is 3D printed as a single folded piece and requires no assembly. The Kinematics Dress represents a new approach to manufacturing which tightly integrates design, simulation, and digital fabrication to create complex, customized products.

Bodies are 3-dimensional but clothing is traditionally made from flat material that is cut and painstakingly pieced together. In contrast, Kinematics garments are created in 3D, directly from body scans and require absolutely no assembly. We employ a smart folding strategy to compress Kinematics garments into a smaller form for efficient fabrication. By folding the garments prior to printing them, we can make complex structures larger than a 3D printer that unfold into their intended shape.

The custom-fit dress is an intricately patterned structure of thousands unique triangular panels interconnected by hinges, all 3D printed as a single piece in nylon. While each component is rigid, in aggregate, they behave as a continuous fabric allowing the dress to flexibly conform and fluidly flow in response to body movement. Unlike traditional fabric, this textile is not uniform; it varies in rigidity, drape, flex, porosity and pattern through space. The entire piece is customizable, from fit and style to flexibility and pattern, with Kinematics Cloth, our app for clothing.

museum collections

The Kinematics Dress is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (New York, NY), the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (Boston, MA) and the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (Sydney, Australia).