“In couture, they call this cheating,” Francis Bitonti, architect-turned-designer and founder of the eponymous New York luxury fashion studio, is rubbing a 4-inch piece of biopolymer mesh between his fingers. We’re at Ravensbourne College in Greenwich, London, where Bitonti is teaching “Studio’s New Skins Summer 2014”, a workshop focusing on the design and production of multifaceted skin textures, or 3D printing. The mesh doesn’t look much, but with a little refining and buffing is essentially a fabric swatch, “and what I think couture could well start from in the next decade.”
Technology and fashion have been quietly fusing over the last decade, but arguably the greatest strides are being made in 3D printing. The process is fairly straightforward: design a garment – hat, shoes, baguette bag – sketch it out on the requisite software, save it on an SD card, transfer the file to a 3D printer, pick a spool of your “fabric” (the polymer I’m holding is about £45 and you’ll need a few to make a garment) and print it in 3D. This takes a few hours as the biolpolymer is heated to 230C, sketched out and built up in layers, but that’s it. Ta-da! You’ve just printed a vase.
While the process remains in the prototypical stage (the vase, for example, will take five hours to print; fabrics and colours are fairly limited), it’s a lot quicker and cheaper than it used to be. “When I was starting out in 2007, a machine cost £100,000. Now it’s around £1,700. A dress would cost £50,000 to make, now it costs £2,000. That’s the same, or less than, a designer dress and it requires less labour.”
Bitonti’s approach isn’t universally admired. He has no background in fashion and says he’s “kind of done” working with designers. Yet he isn’t afraid to suggest that all couture will be printable, all fabrics replicable. But, thanks to a background in architecture, he’s honed his own sort of hybrid niche – “the process between designing the facade of a building isn’t dissimilar from building a dress”.
His move into fashion technology has been gradual. In the mid-noughties, he started making belts for New York designer Katie Gallagher. He later met New York-based 3D printing marketplace Shapeways, collaborating with them on 3D products. In 2013 he agreed to work with Ace Hotel New York, Shapeways and designer Michael Schmidt to build a 3D dress for burlesque dancer, Dita Von Teese. The dress was geometric, black and terrifying, fetishist-friendly, trypophobia-unfriendly, which may explain why he’s since been approached by customers after one of two things: sex toys and lingerie – “but we’re making neither”.
There are a few designers working in 3D. Dutch designer Iris van Herpen has been showing her 3D pieces since 2012 and has designed for Lady Gaga. But with his new line launching this month, Bitonti is fast becoming the face of 3D fashion.
Dita’s dress was created from 3,000 moving parts made using “selective laser sintering”, in which a metal is built up in layers from plastic powder fused together with a laser. “It was just a case of her climbing into the corset and lacing her up. The dress weighed 5kg, with each piece 0.5mm thick.” It took a while to design (Bitonti and Von Teese batted ideas back and forth over Skype) but a day to print in the Shapeways factory in Queens, “although we could have done it in less time. The demand for one-off pieces is not the aim. It’s nice to pique interest with prototypes, but I want to mass produce.”
Bitonti has grand ambitions. Indeed, developments in computer-based design and 3D printing mean designers are no longer limited by their knowledge of materials. They are on the verge of replicating leather, skin and even fur. The positives include perfectly dimensioned mannequins, mass production and customisation, technologies Bitonti is capitalising on by launching Molecule, his own line of 3D printed clothes.
But surely the two can coexist, fashion and printed fashion? People still care about the provenance of their clothing. “In five to 10 years, I think a large percentage of casual goods will be entirely printed,” says Bitonti, in a heartbeat.
Naturally this puts the luxury market in a tight spot. Mass production will render exclusivity redundant, with designers being reduced to sketch artists. “But I think there’s a new generation ready for the change,” says Bitonti. “The millennials, the ones embracing normcore.”
For him, it’s the next logical step: “There is no limit to what this technology can do. Every other sector – music, our social lives, films – has been subjected to technology. From where I started, I’m shocked by how far the software has come in the last year. So long as we keep educating, we can get there.”
