Who, besides people in tech or in intelligence agencies, could’ve foreseen the leap from bulky pagers and car phones to cloud computing and wireless devices?

And your Nokia and Palm Pilot were cute until it was hello smartphone.

What if one day shopping for clothes at stores and online isn’t the end, because we’ve learned to make our own 3D-printed pieces…and it gets easier and easier to produce?

3D printers create more than just clothes, of course, but the consumer-grade printers often come with spools and plastic filament (AKA a spool of material, somewhat like thread), so it reminds me of sewing machines. Instead of unspooling thread, however, 3D printers unspool and melt plastic.

These printers can be used to create conceptual, artistic pieces…you know, the kind of fascinating stuff that comes trotting down the runways.

Designer Iris Van Herpen has incorporated the use of 3D printing in her collections since 2010.

A couture wedding dress Van Herpen designed for this client took almost two days to print. $$$

Pieces like these remind me of the sculpted confections of designer Charles James (1906-1978), who considered himself more a sculptor than anything else. He didn’t live long enough to see 3D printers, yet he developed his own innovative ways of giving texture and volume to his multi-layered designs.

Through careful examinations as well as X-rays and CT scans at history museums and hospitals—yep, at hospitals—it’s been discovered that his gowns’ unique and iconic shapes were made with rigid internal structure like corsetry, boning, padding, crinolines, bustles, horsehair, plastic netting, and, relevantly enough, melted plastic.

Even just by looking at them, it’s obvious that so much work went into their creation.

I wonder if 3D printers had been available during his lifetime, would Charles James have remained faithful to his hands-on craft or would he have knocked someone over trying to get to a printer first. :)

On one of my old favorite TV shows, Project Runway, contestants in a season 14 episode were challenged to incorporate 3D printed materials in their creation of avant-garde designs. These designs were supposed to be inspired by the architecture of NYC bridges.

I thought, wow, that’s all really cool, but of course 3D printers are some kind of far-fetched sorcery device only millionaires and TV show producers can get their hands on.

My focus still remained on the more traditional means of creation, watching the PR contestants turn nothings into a whole lot of somethings. Bolts of fabric and seemingly meager sketches were slowly transformed into stunning creations that a model could sashay down the runway in.

How?, I kept wondering, until I bought a dress pattern from a shop, sewed a shoddy attempt at a dress out of both pleather and plain fabric, and called it a day, never to return to dress-pattern sewing.

It was boring and difficult. No lights, camera, or glamour.

Just a girl on her living room floor fighting with a dress pattern.

Beyond mending, light sewing, and cutting and restyling my clothes, I wouldn’t say I have a great interest in producing clothes.

However, since I’ve been researching 3D printers and I see how affordable they actually are, I think I might just develop an interest in watching a machine make my clothes. Bwahaha.

It can be used as a smart “sewing machine”, helping us to do less physical work.

These printers have options where you can design 3D models on a desktop yourself, select models from a program, or scan/take a picture of a real-life object you want the printer to recreate. (I think I know which two options we’d choose at first.)

A slicer program then “slices” your digital 3D model into layers and also converts it into something called G-code, which is a set of complex instructions for the printer—stop when it’s this high, make it this narrow, this long, etc.

3D printers aren’t just named for what they print out into the real world but how even their components actually move three dimensionally, across x, y, and z axes. Up and down, side to side, front and back.

A 3D printer can reduce textile waste since it creates exactly what it’s instructed to create, so, if everything goes smoothly, no excess material is being discarded as would be the case in traditional garment making.

With inflation rising and fashion being the pile of boring that it currently is, I don’t think a 3D printer would be such a terrible investment.

You could watch tutorials on creating 3D models and learn through trial and error. Make something fun. Make some small avant-garde piece.

Maybe my suggestion is a bit out there, but at one time, so was using a portable computer that fit in our hands. Now it’s just part of life.