Reaction Diffusion Textiles and Pattern Making

Okay this this particular look from the collection, modeled by the super badass Madison, I dropped the ball on just a bit.

As lovely and clean as it looks in the white, I really wanted to use it as a base for my reaction diffusion algorithm, with the end result looking more like this. (Though I do love the clean well tailored lines)

To that end, I've been working on remaking it using a little more digital prowess, including the textile printing that was slightly out of my budget for the original.This was actually the first dress I designed for the collection, thus there were many many tortured muslin iterations as I learned how to make a well fitting garment.

After finally getting one that fit nicely to my dress form, I tore it apart and scanned it in. Madison's version was actually heavily tailored from this pattern (since we only were able to fit our models after winter break), and her hips and arms are much more slender than my own or the dress form's.

 From here, I was a quick live trace away from a nice clean vector image of my pattern to scale, which I then threw into a slightly tailored reaction diffusion application in Cinder. For those of you who have never encountered reaction diffusion, it looks something like this.

It essentially is two equations that can be used to simulate a chemical reaction that is used in nature to generate an infinite number of animal patterns/prints. This is old code from earlier my knit reaction diffusion work. Toxiclibs does an amazing job of summarizing the more technical aspects of the simulation if you are interested.

I was particularly interested in incorporating this simulation/generative art into my fashion design work since I think it draws a very elegant parallel to the furs/skins more often used in high fashion and on the run way. This application allows you to grow your own personally customized "skin" directly onto the pattern pieces for an organic and personalized feel that you don't need to carefully skin hundreds of tropical fish for.

Here's the final pattern, with each pattern piece thrown into the application and its texture grown onto it.

Check out This Post where I talk about the printing process