Financial Times: 3D Printed Hats

Article link: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b8920acc-f08a-11e3-b112-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3H0ddcBpR 

Boffin tops

London-based hat designer Gabriela Ligenza has launched a pioneering collection of 3D-printed hats, writes Emma Firth. Her range of five sculptural and surreal designs – which wouldn’t look out of place at this month’s Venice Biennale of Architecture – arose from her desire to “create contemporary pieces that can be architectural but don’t dwarf the wearer”.

Ligenza, a trained architect, says her hats “stretch the boundaries of art”. 3D printing, she argues, is not in competition with hand-crafting: “It just allows us to create something that we otherwise couldn’t manually.”

Gabriela Ligenza’s 3D ‘Poem’ hat

The finished form is the result of a collaboration between Ligenza, a scholar in mathematical art and a 3D modeller for the fashion industry. First, Ligenza sketches a design, which is digitally turned into three dimensions by a modeller before it is sent to print. With the chosen material in a tray, a laser fuses the contours of the object. Once cooled, the loose material is removed and the solid structure is revealed underneath. This can then be painted, dyed and finished.

Each piece is intended to attract attention, from an innovative bowl-shaped hat formed by the words from ASJ Tessimond’s poem “Day Dream”, to representations of forms found in nature. Ligenza says big events like Ascot would be perfect – “unlike a wedding, where you don’t want to outshine the protagonist”.

3D printing offers milliners the potential to create hats or other fashion accessories that have “the same core designs, but which are individualised for each particular customer”, says Professor Stephen Hoskins, an expert in 3D printing.

Great British Racing, the marketing arm of British horseracing, has just commissioned Ligenza’s poem hat, swapping the original words for those of the 2014 Royal Ascot poem.

So have the seeds been planted for more 3D-printed headgear? Leading British milliner Stephen Jones says he’s keen to “explore the world of tiaras and objects for the head by using 3D printing techniques”. It would enable designers to make mass-customised items that can be tailored to the individual without adding extra cost to the manufacturing process. Printing is eco-friendly too. Instead of shipping her hats around the world, Ligenza says, “if I have a customer in Australia, I can send her a file and she can have it printed in situ”.