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

It’s been 100 years since the first BMW model went into production. In the century that has followed, the company has created iconic vehicles and pioneered new technology. To mark its centenary, the BMW Group is championing the brands who are conceiving the very future of motoring – MINI, BMW, Rolls Royce and BMW Motorrad. MINI is championing the innovators who are conceiving the future. So far we’ve spoken to multi-media artist Margot Bowman and audio visual director Marcus Lyall, to find out how their creative process could influence the journeys we’ll soon be taking. Here, we meet Julia Koerner, the Austrian architect, lecturer, designer and one of the world’s leading lights when it comes to pioneering 3D printing techniques in the fashion industry.

Talking over the phone from her home in California, Koerner is effusively talking up the possibilities of a brave new world in which fashion doesn’t have to mean waste, exploitation and uniformity; a world made possible by visionary use of 3D printing. Koerner is one of MINI’s Future Shapers, a group of designers, scientists and artists the iconic car brand has commissioned to explore what personalised experiences and products could look like in the future – both in mobility and culture.

After a decade spent honing her computer modelling skills in architecture, Koerner rose to prominence in fashion circles by unleashing those skills in eye-catching collaborations with Parisian couture house Maison Lesage and the Dutch designer Iris van Herpen. Last year, she launched an entirely 3D-printed ready-to-wear collection named “Sporophyte”, a reference to the life cycles of plants and algae that shows a fascination with the natural world from which she draws much inspiration.

Her work with MINI on this project is to celebrate individuality and hyper-personalisation by creating 4D fashion – a type of clothing that is 3D printed and rendered profoundly bespoke by its ability to react to temperature, light and moisture.

I spoke to Koerner about her work with MINI and her vision of the future–a fantastical-sounding future made possible: clothes that change colour according to our mood, that alter their own fit according to changes in the weather, that can be produced in a way that could make waste material and sweatshops a thing of the past.

Motherboard: First off, how did you start using 3D-printing technology to make clothes?

Julia Koerner: Recent advancements have made 3D printing more available to fashion designers, product designers and architects. Architecture is my background, and I’ve been working with the 3D-printing technology for more than a decade. For a long time I worked with the internationally-renowned product designer Ross Lovegrove in London, and in that period I got really excited about the possibilities of using the 3D printing to make something beautiful, something that could be used right away. I guess that was one of the reasons why, back in 2012, the Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen got in touch wanting to work together on her 3D-printed fashion pieces. Since then, I’ve become increasingly involved with the fashion industry.

Let’s talk about your collaboration with Iris van Herpen. That was really a turning point for 3D-printed fashion, wasn’t it?

I started collaborating with Iris in 2012, and then in 2013 I was working on the first ever flexible, 3D-printed dress – until then, the price of the material meant that whatever clothes were produced with the technology were invariably done so within haute couture. They were also very rigid and hard, you couldn’t really move in them and they were more like museum pieces. What we did in 2013 was use a material that you could print and it would be flexible – it was a turning point because it forced people to start looking at the fashion possibilities of 3D printing with different eyes.

© Tom Oldham

You’ve talked a lot previously about the advantages of 3D printing – what do you think the key benefits are with regards to people being able to personalise their outfits?

One of the really exciting things for me is that you can 3D scan a human’s body and design the garment so that it fits exactly to their figure. A lot of unnecessary shipping happens around the world because people order clothes that don’t fit and have to send them back, so if used en masse 3D-printed clothes production could have environmental benefits.

Cool.

Another thought about the personalisation, which I talked a lot about with MINI, is that you already have this personalised dress that fits you perfectly – but what if the material can adapt, so that if your body shape changes over time, the dress adapts to your new proportions? Also, we always go and buy clothes that fit our personality, right? But the clothes we buy never truly reflect our personality; it’s a product and it’s not going to adapt to who you are on Monday and again for who you are on Friday. It doesn’t really personalise to exactly how you feel. I think that’s a really exciting thing that a lot of the research with MINI was about – how could you rethink that and have something that starts to react to your personality?

What if you didn’t want it to be revealed? What if you were really hungover and didn’t want anyone to know?

Well, then you would buy a different dress.