This week’s selection is The Bristle Dress by Francis Bitonti Studio.
Having seen numerous fantastic and outlandish 3D printed fashion pieces, we’re still amazed at the complexity of The Bristle Dress, which is composed of a top piece that basically defies description in words (see above image) and a lower skirt.
While the design is certainly interesting, there’s one more aspect that makes us very excited: you can download and print this item yourself! It has been made available on Thingiverse and is composed of a very large number of parts, some of which look like this one:
But hold on a second, let’s make something perfectly clear: this would be incredibly challenging to print. First, the top is composed of no less than sixty-nine (69!) separate printable parts. The skirt is composed of thirty-eight. Even on a good day, you’d spend a very long time, weeks, perhaps, printing all these pieces. Then you’d have to assemble them. Actually, assembling them even without resizing would be a challenge due to the number of parts and little in the way of instructions. In fact, as of this writing, the Thingiverse page claims “0 made” so far.
There’s a second problem: sizing. Any fashion item must fit the wearer and the supplied files would have to be very carefully resized in some coordinated way so that the resized pieces would still fit together as designed. We’re not sure how to do that. Thingiverse has conveniently included the model in their “Customizer”, but it only produces a simple representation of the skirt – in one piece.
Nevertheless, the Thingiverse page includes pre-sliced X3G files that would work immediately on your MakerBot Replicator 2, if you have one. If you don’t, prepare for a busy period of slicing. We might try printing the top.
Via Thingiverse and Design Milk