In 1801, a French weaver named Joseph Marie Jacquard demonstrated a device that changed the world. Using a series of perforated cards, the Jacquard loom made it possible to quickly weave complex patterns. Hitherto difficult and expensive designs like brocades and paisleys could be mass-produced by machine.
Fashion was never the same. Neither was technology. Jacquard's innovation led to the creation of a chain of wonders, from calculating machines to computers to elaborate design programs and 3-D printers.
We've come full circle. Last year, a 26-year-old fashion designer stunned the fashion world with a collection of dresses that incorporate computer-assisted designs, executed by 3-D printers, that would be extremely time-consuming, if not impossible, for a human sewer.
Noa Raviv's "Hard Copy" collection, unveiled at her alma mater, the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design in Israel, earned the prestigious Finy Leitersdorf excellence award. It then bought her Fashion Designer of the Year honors at the 2014 international 3-D Printshow in London.
Next week she'll be in Anchorage to present a talk at the Anchorage Museum. In an email from her hometown, Tel Aviv, Raviv, now 27, said it would be her first trip to Alaska.
"I believe fashion reflects culture in the best possible way," she wrote. "It's one of the greatest and most popular forms of expression."
In her quest to achieve that expression, 3-D printing has proved to be "an amazing tool for a designer to work with," she said. "3-D printing enables (one) to imagine and produce things that could not be created in any other way."
It's not a completely new technology. Elementary 3-D printers have been around since the 1980s. But recent advances in engineering have made it more practical on several levels. The military uses it to create spare parts on the spot at remote sites. Last year a Boston-based design team, Nervous System, gave a workshop in Anchorage at which they demonstrated their use of the machines for creating jewelry. An Anchorage company, Landis Airglas Aircraft Skis, is using 3-D printers to make the molds for fiberglass skis used by Bush planes.
In November and December, a number of items were produced by a 3-D printer on the International Space Station. The first objects to be manufactured off the planet included a part for the printer itself and a ratchet wrench. NASA is a big booster of the system, which would make it unnecessary to transport spare parts on a long voyage, to Mars for instance. A broken toilet handle could be reproduced in space rather than waiting for a replacement to be shipped from Earth.
Eagle River High School has two 3-D printers that science teacher Brad Fleener uses to teach manufacturing skills.
"The students draw small objects, 4 to 6 inches," he explained. "We input the design into a CAD file, the computer reads that and the machine squirts out little tiny bits of plastic." The plastic is a strand on a spool, like fishing line. "There's a little head that heats up and goes back and forth, building up the shape."
The objects produced are necessarily small, he said, but not merely ornamental, as Fleener himself learned when the plastic gears on his garage door stripped out. "I measured the diameter and spacing with a caliper, drew it on Inventor software and printed it out on the 3-D printer," he said. "It works like new."
Raviv drew some of her ideas from the lines used to depict three-dimensional volume in computer design programs. These are readily seen in the fabric patterns of the Hard Copy dresses, which resemble them in the two-dimensional format of flat cloth. But then she took it a step further.
"I have deliberately created defective digital images with 3-D software," she said in an artist's statement. "Deformed objects that were created by a command that the software was unable to execute. These objects cannot be printed or produced in reality. They exist only in the virtual space."
She clarified that for ADN, saying, "To make it more accurate, I was inspired by deformed objects" created by the "impossible" command. "I translated this into real objects and dresses."
The 3-D objects used for some of the Hard Copy dresses are made of rigid polymer, not unlike the gears for Fleener's garage door or the ratchet wrench on the space station. She then sewed them onto the traditionally manufactured dresses.
"But I made the garments look as if they were 3-D printed," she added.
The result is an interface between two- and three-dimensional objects. She's referred to this as "play," "optical illusion" and "tension between real and virtual." Video of the dresses in motion shows how the viewer is caught off guard by the waving lines, not certain as to where the polymer, cloth and model start or depart from one another.
But Raviv sees her aesthetic statement as human rather than cyborg, a way to express individuality and address the meaning of one-of-a-kind-ness in a world of mass reproduction, a testament against designs that are copied so many times that they become "an empty repetition of style and expression."
Ancient Roman and Greek statues were part of her inspiration, she said. "The silhouettes were influenced by classical sculptures, which were the point of departure for creating the collection. Those sculptures are rarely found unbroken, thus the shapes and patterns of the collection are mostly non-symmetrical and have a sort of distorted or fractured look."
The world press has taken note as Raviv takes Jacquard's union of cloth and high tech to a new dimension. No Camels, a popular Israeli culture webzine, is one of several voices praising her "unique vision for the fashion of the distant future to come."
But to some extent, that future is already here -- at least at Eagle River High School and other schools that have the equipment. The students are fascinated by it -- it's amazing just to watch it work. So far no one's made a working plastic gun, though instructions are online, but students have readily produced snowflake Christmas decorations and miniature cars, Fleener said.
"And cases for cellphones," he added. "Those are really popular."
NOA RAVIV will speak at the Anchorage Museum at 6 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 23. For those hours, admission will be half the usual price: $6 for adults. Admission to the talk is free for museum members.