3D-Printed Dress Designer Goes Cloud Commercial

You’ve no doubt seen images of Dita von Teese’s 3D-printed gown pop up on our site and elsewhere.  Now that the image of the burlesque performer in her high-tech garment has sufficiently saturated the media, the dress’s designer, Francis Bitonti, is taking his 3D-printed fashion to the public with the world’s first commercially available line produced completely via cloud manufacturing.

Starting tomorrow, the Francis Bitonti studio will be accepting pre-orders for its Cloud Collection, a series of “hackable, shareable, and downloadable” products that can be printed through the distributed 3D printer network of 3D Hubs and securely shared with secure file sharing service Secure 3D.  On Bitonti’s site, products will be displayed as 3D models using the multi-optics cloud rendering engine Lagoa so that customers will be able to customize objects in a full 360-degree space.  The products can then be downloaded and printed “on demand by a hand-selected network of 3D printers” through 3D Hubs.  The studio’s first collection in the Cloud Collection series is called “Entropy”, made up of luxury goods like “3D printed fine jewelry and multi-material accessories” to be released this Fall (You can see a vase from the collection in various stages of customization above).  Next year, the designers will move on to ready-to-wear items, with each item serialized and made to order.  Pre-orders for the ready-to-wear line will begin in early Fall.

In the future, the studio plans to constrain the items that can be ordered based on the printers closest to a customer.  If Mr. Smith in Cleveland can only print with a certain material on a certain machine and you live in Paris, you’ll have to order something else more suited to your locale.  The idea, according to the studio, is to “[reinvent] the factory to build a new production and distribution infrastructure from the ground up.” If firms like Bitonti’s are embracing the idea of distributed manufacturing, my hope is that other, larger companies won’t be afraid of following in his footsteps.  In some ways, the designer’s adoption of such a business model signals a global return to local manufacturing.

Source: Francis Bitoni Studio