CMU School of Drama


Tuesday, March 12, 2024

MIT's 4D knit dress and robot arm make custom clothing

www.designboom.com: MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab team develops the 4D Knit Dress, a new way to personalize a dress in any size using a six-axis robot arm typically used in the automotive industry, computerized knitting, and heat-activated yarns. Led by Sasha MicKinlay, a recent graduate of the MIT Department of Architecture, in collaboration with fashion company Ministry of Supply, 4D Knit Dress can generate clothing that fits the wearer by sculpting the garment around their body and using a robot arm that blows dry the heat-activated yarn to style the fabric.

1 comment:

Aster said...

The MIT knit dress is so cool. My cousin is a fashion designer and she is so excited about this fabric. Obviously the fabric is very much in the early development stages and is quite expensive, however it is also really cool. I wonder how it is actually programmed. Do you upload a model? I also really like that this fabric is reusable. I wonder exactly how much the fabric can stretch and shrink. How hot does it have to get? Can you mold it to the model who will be wearing the dress or does to get too hot and has to be on a mannequin. I’m also curious about the chemical makeup of the yarn itself. What allows it to shrink? I think this technology has a lot of potential but it’s just so new. I’m very interested in and excited to see how it will grow in the coming years. I hope it doesn’t just become another piece of technology that is forgotten over time.