Julia Koerner is Pioneering 3D Printing Techniques in the Fashion Industry

Do you see the type of personalisation enabled by 3D fashion printing influencing the future of car design?

Yes, for sure. I experimented with thermochromic colour pigments, where you have a material that can temporarily change colour when it’s exposed to heat – you have a car that changes colour dependent on heat exposure. Or you could think about materials that glow, and wouldn’t it be very nice if our cars all lit up at night and saved energy, and were more safe? So I think it’s about certain narratives in terms of personalisation that were the important thing in this project I worked on alongside MINI.

© Tom Oldham

I heard that a big inspiration for the work you’ve done with MINI is the natural world. Can you tell me more about that?

In this specific case I looked at the deep-sea sponge, which adapts to its environment, growing its fibres depending on where it needs to be more structural, or soft, or transparent. When one season is over a lot of our clothes just go in the closet, or we throw them away. But what if dresses could adapt over time to whatever style we feel like? Let’s say on a sunny day, the material opens up and it’s looser, allowing more air to get through; but on a rainy day, the material closes and it keeps you covered and warm. I also thought about this in a stylistic sense – when you feel like you wanna wear a short dress, it’s short. But when you think, ‘Oh no, it’s getting a bit chilly,’ it could get longer and warmer just through the power of your own thoughts. That would be really exciting. And that’s for Londoners, especially!

That’s super-futuristic, right? But some of the conversations we had with MINI were about how, in nature, you have these things, these systems, which can adapt to the environment and I’m extremely inspired by that.

There’s a lot of doom tied up in the ongoing narratives around the environment–things like poaching, pollution, global warming. Do you feel there’s any urgency on your part to capture, in fashion design, a natural world that seems to be disappearing, or is at least under threat?

Not in such a large picture as saving the world but I’m thinking we could start working with recycled filaments–for example, used plastic waste–to create clothes. These are really ideas of how you could work with materials that are biodegradable and sustainable. That’s something that I’m personally interested in. Certainly if we have the capability to learn from nature, to make our world a better place to live in – whether that’s brands starting to look at electrical vehicles, or how you can eliminate waste, or use recycled materials – then we should do that. I think that when people think about an item of clothing being “recycled”, in their heads they’re going to feel like they have to make an aesthetic compromise. But that could change. I want to use my computational knowledge to create fabric-like networks, which become close to a wearable garment, change people’s reactions. ‘Oh, it doesn’t look like it’s 3D-printed!’ Because people associate 3D-printed fashions with big stiff, sculpted, polymetric designs but I think that the moment you work in a fine, layered technique to overcome the material disadvantages, you can turn this into an advantage.

So it’s about making the environment fashionable, in two senses?

Yes.

© Tom Oldham

Do you see 3D-printed clothing having any potential to help human beings in crisis zones in the future – refugees, victims of famine, or environmental disaster? Just getting basic clothing to desperate people in a quick, cheap, easy way?

Certainly, in the future. When the material that 3D printers use gets more wearable and comfortable, more flexible and textile-like, you might be able to do that. Wearable 3D-printed clothing isn’t developed to the extent that it can be widespread yet. But it could well be in the future.

Okay, cool. I’ve got one last question. Across the arts, many visions of the future tend to present it as a time or a place where uniformity rules – everything is quite similar and generic. I’m thinking predominantly about dystopian visions of the future, but also some utopian ones. In your way of working – ensuring things can be personalised, individualised–is there any sense of dissent or defiance against that commonly held view of the future as a place of bland uniformity?

Everyone has the same phone – almost everyone, they all look the same – but there is this deep need to personalise. So the moment people buy their phones they buy their covers, add their own individual music, pictures they like, videos they’ve shot, and so on. But how could the physical object also adapt to what you like or feel like? So that you don’t have to always buy new cases, but the shape of it changes to whatever you want. It turns black when you want it to turn black. It turns white when you want it to turn white. I think that we as designers have to allow for this need that people have to own personal products, because it will always be there – whether that’s a car, a phone, or a dress. I think it would be fabulous if these objects could adapt and be personalised without always being thrown away after a year or so.

So it’s change without waste.

Yeah. But at the same time allowing us to express ourselves.

The BMW Group Future Experience Exhibition showcasing MINI’s vision of the NEXT 100 years will take place at the Roundhouse, London, from the 18th to the 26th of June. If you want to win two VIP tickets to MINI’s invite only event on June 20th, enter your details

here.
See the rest of The Future Shapers Project here

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Julia Koerner is Pioneering 3D Printing Techniques in the Fashion Industry