Move over, Justin LeBlanc[1]! There’s a new 3D printing fashion designer reigning the runway. At this year’s Fashion Art Toronto (FAT), Toronto-based Starkers Corsetry unveiled its latest line of corset couture with a bit of 3D printed flair.
The founder of Starkers Corsetry, Dianna DiNoble, first became interested in corsetry while studying art history in high school. She’d come across this strange piece of clothing that didn’t just fit a body, but caused a body to fit it. Corsets today are often seen as an oppressive component of ancient fashion, but DiNoble began researching whether or not the women who wore them in the past viewed them in the same way. Eventually, when she wanted one herself, there was no one to turn to, so she attended art school, where she learned how to make them herself.
Dianna DiNoble has been creating custom corset eleganza for about twenty-two years, now, and showing off her style at Fashion Art Toronto (FAT) for the past eight. At this year’s FAT event, titled INFASHION/UNFASHION, the designer explored the show’s theme of polar opposites from a variety of perspectives. In addition to the stark contrast of her white and black colour scheme, DiNoble’s line, “White Space Conflict”, highlights distinctions between the Victorian roots of her own corsets with the fashion seen in sci-fiction. The artist describes her inspiration for the pieces:
I’m not as much of a science fiction fan as some people are; however, my husband loves science fiction. So, of course, I’ll sit there and watch those movies with him. And I’ve always found that fashion in science fiction is so amazing and inspiring because, when they show fashion in the future, they completely do away with the constraints of what we have available material-wise today and the fabric almost seems utilitarian. They’ll have some sort of cooling element… or some material that can heal a sore muscle or something like that. There are amazing possibilities with the imagination of science fiction. And I thought it’d be a really interesting way to look at the fashion of science fiction, instead of just being stuck with the material that we have now.
Though DiNoble explains that the pieces in her collection don’t draw directly from any particular film, it’s evident that they are sci-fi inspired. The looks are clean combinations of Mad Max and Blade Runner with a 19th Century twist. And the 3D printed accessories are the cyberpunk icing on the cake.
More or less everything you see in the video above that doesn’t look like it’s made of vinyl, leather or chiffon is 3D printed. The most striking to me, personally, are the 3D-printed eye patches, but DiNoble also fabricated the bracelets, all of the butterflies attached to her dresses, and a unique 3D-printed necklace (pictured right) that streams down the back of one of her designs. The necklace is made up of a glowing element and a set of three 3D-printed vertebrae models that match the L1, L2, and L3 sections of the spinal column on which they’re meant to rest.
Creating these accessories wasn’t easy. Not only did DiNoble have to learn how to use Blender from scratch to model her pieces, but she and Bloom had to master the Replicator 2 that printed them. They ran into more than a handful of problems, troubleshooting with customer service reps from MakerBot, just to manufacture the pieces in the show. Unfortunately, however, DiNoble wasn’t able to 3D print as many objects as she’d hoped. Missing from the line were some animatronic butterflies that her husband designed, but couldn’t manage to print. She describes witnessing people at the local Maker Faire using their 3D printers and how “maddeningly easy it is for them to break out their Cupcake CNCs and have them work perfectly.”
Until DiNoble feels that she has refined her Blender skills, she won’t be making and selling 3D printed accessories online, having given away all of her eye patches to friends already. Anyone who’s printed something on a 3D printer, however, will tell you that, as well as being additive, 3D printing is addictive. She says it’s not out of the question that she’ll release her 3D-printable designs onto Thingiverse – though I had to cajole her a bit in that direction. What you’re more likely to see, DiNoble tells me, is a 3D-printed corset and some neat animatronics in the near future.
[1] The Project Runway contestant who brought 3D printed accessories to his final runway designs on the last season of the show.
