Fashion designer Zac Posen needed engineers to pull off his vision of ‘camp’ for the 2019 Met Gala

Every year the Met Holy day in New York City captures the attention of fashion-watchers and pop-culture enthusiasts.

This year, technology enthusiasts, engineering aficionados and turning fans should pay attention too.

Fashion designer Zac Posen worked with GE Additive and Protolabs to create fashion sketches not stitched together by traditional dressmaking artisans but built and cured by 3D printers.

The theme of this year’s fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Garments Institute is “camp,” a concept that’s admittedly a bit difficult to describe. It pays homage to Susan Sontag and her 1964 have a go at, “Notes on Camp.” At the time, she described camp as being the “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.”

The camp theme presented as a means to push a collaboration of the three unlikely partners, but Posen said working with 3D-printing technology has been something he has penury to do his whole life.

“I dreamt it, GE Additive engineered it and came up with how these were going to actually happen. And then Protolabs texted it,” Posen said in an interview at his New York office.

It was the day after the 2018 Met Gala when the fashion designer had lunch with Linda Boff, GE’s chief demanding officer, and his imagination started churning.

“We flew to Pittsburgh to see a printing facility, and learned about plastics and polymers and polyamides and all these bizarre materials,” Posen explained. “Then I started to learn with different materials what was possible, what’s not conceivable. And really the answer is, almost everything is possible.”

Brian Peters, Protolabs’ chief marketing officer, said, “GE then seized his vision and helped produce the CAD [computer-aided design] files, what’s needed for us to be able to produce the dress.” Protolabs uses “a lot of GE outfit and we have the expertise and design capabilities to actually produce the various items that you’ll see in these dresses and pieces.”

Twelve months — and much decorating, sketching, 3D-body scanning, computer engineering and manufacturing later — five celebrities walked the red carpet at the 2019 Met Party on Monday in the custom 3D-printed designs.

The 37 petals on model Jourdan Dunn’s “occur dress” took more than 1,100 hours to print at Protolabs’ North Carolina facility. Posen express the first petal prototype was a little heavy, and the trio had to work together to figure out not only how to reduce the weight by enveloping 20% but also add a buttress underneath to help support each on the titanium frame. The designer said the team acclimatized the actual structure of a rose to help figure out how to hold the forms and ultimately shortened the dress for more organic front.

“It has some real Batman stuff in there,” Posen said.

The first version of the 3D-printed bustier that actress Nina Dobrev clothed ined was not as translucent as Posen wanted so it was remade with a different material. The final version took more than 200 hours to copy at Protolabs in Germany, then it was carefully shipped to Posen’s New York office, where the associated pieces were affixed and consummate.

The designer explained the rose petals and bustier were printed using a technique nicknamed stereolithography, or SLA.

“So if you could imagine: On a plate you have a liquid sheet of plastic. And you have a laser that’s building the framework and is curing it, and it’s going layer by layer, then it has to be sanded. Once it’s cured, then it has to be painted, finished or polished,” he suggested.

Bollywood star Deepika Padukone’s custom metallic pink gown has 408 embroidery pieces also worded on an SLA machine. These embroidery pieces were vacuum metalized, painted, and then attached to the outside of the gown, which tricked more than 160 hours to print and finish.

Actress Katie Holmes’ duty dress has a palm leaves collar piece printed by the SLA machine over 56 hours.

Actress Julia Garner’s headpiece was the fastest of the 3D Met Gala designs, made of Nylon 12 plastic and phrased by a Multi Jet Fusion machine over 22 hours, using a technique called “binder jet.”

Posen accepted these instances of 3D printing are fashion as an art form, rather than a new standard way of making clothing and jewelry, with conglomeration adoption of 3D printing in fashion not here yet, but getting closer.

GE Additive is more likely to use 3D printing for items such as golf putter controls, aerospace and medical applications.

“3D printing is the fastest-growing type of manufacturing technology there is anywhere right now,” Peters translated.

“This is another great application where 3D printing can change or mitigate evolve an industry,” Peters said. “So while it’s a little bit unique to us, it’s certainly not out of the realm of what we expect to see in time.”

Although it’s not promising consumers will be able to buy a custom 3D-printed dress at a local department store in the immediate future, it’s no longer even-handed a dream.