Stephanie Santos is a designer who wants to combine the beauties of nature and art with fashion/textile technology through 3D printing.
About Santos
Santos brings a multicultural appreciation of art into fashion. Born to Portuguese parents in Luxembourg, she studied various fields in art and design in both Luxembourg and Northern France. She admires and takes inspiration from the aesthetics of nature (especially its flora) and strives to incorporate her interpretation of nature and art into her work using both traditional and high-tech techniques.
While studying at the TextileLab in Amsterdam, she was astounded by the different possibilities for innovation in garment and textile design and her curiosity and enthusiasm drove her to explore these FashionTech possibilities in her own 3D printed clothing line.
She explains of her fashion brand:
“STEPHANIE SANTOS aims on representing an intersection of design and Technology within the Fashion field. Her work fusions traditional Haute couture garment construction as well as digital techniques and fabrication. The products are handmade and/or 3D (hand)printed.
The Brand takes it inspirations partly from Nature, by biomimicking aspects from the fungi kingdom and plants. And it elevates these aesthetics into ergonomic designs around the female body to create natural, fitted elegance.”
Behind The Brand
Santos’ collections mainly feature TPU, which as a flexible material has proven an ideal candidate for her designs. Rather than some of the desktop 3D printers we’ve seen, Santos uses the 3Doodler 3D printing pen to hand-draw her designs in TPU.
Her first collection — HYBRID — was the pathway into her current profession as before this collection, she was only familiar with traditional techniques. Santos has been researching working with 3D printing technologies since 2017 and has been developing her own techniques to build her garments. This new technology gives Santos freedoms and brand new opportunities to innovate and rethink the definition of garment.
HYBRID
Stephanie’s very first collection in Fashion Design and Garment making techniques, HYBRID, was created for her final exam at ESMOD University in Roubaix, France.
The collection contained a total of 18 garments, where some were made purely out of fabric, others with a combination of fabric and the 3D pen, and two made completely out of the 3D pen. Quite literally, this collection really was a hybrid!
The creative process, however, requires patience. The designer shares that the design pictured on the right above took about 80 hours to complete.
Santos explains the story behind this collection:
“Inspired by the gills of mushrooms and Iris Van Herpen, I wanted the design to be mysteriously classy and feminin with a touch of clean futurism.”
3D Printed Couture
Santos is far from the first to have experimented with 3D printing and fashion. There are definitely other such designers we have covered on Fabbaloo such as Maja Milinić-Bogdanović, Susana Marcques, Zac Posen, and tons of others.
Everything is updated with increasing technology, so why should the fashion industry — one of the fastest moving and growing industries — be stuck in the past? 3D printing offers many unique creative abilities to designers for them to be able to better express themselves through their garments.
Via Stephanie Santos
