7 minute read

STEPHANIE DEPALMA X ERIC UTLEY

FROM MATERIALS TO LIVING ORGANS

Engineers from GE Additive and Protolabs refl ect on their collaboration with Zac Posen, which saw 3D printing used for the creation of Meta Gala gowns.

In 2019, fashion designer Zac Posen teamed up with GE Additive and Protolabs to harness 3D printing technology in the development of several garments that would be worn by Jourdan Dunn, Nina Dobrev, Katie Holmes, Julia Garner and Deepika Padukone at that year’s Met Gala.

Earlier this year, we brought together GE Additive Operations Leader Stephanie DePalma [SDP] and Protolabs Applications Engineer Eric Utley [EU] to recount the 1,500 manufacturing hours it took to develop the fashion pieces.

SDP: So, before the Met Gala project, I was involved in the engineering consulting business branded AddWorks within GE Additive. And that was really the whole premise of how we started this collaboration with Zac of teaching customers about the technology of 3D printing, about engineering design and how to take a vision that you have in your head and create it into 3D digital space and then make it a physical reality with the machine. That was really what I was doing before. Since the Met Gala, one of the things that we found that's been tremendously helpful was the entire story that we went through with Zac of taking somebody who knew the premise of the technology but wasn't obviously super technical, and then how we communicated what the technology was capable of doing, the design journey that we went on of taking those things that were in Zac's head and making them a reality and then being able to show the physical end result of what we had at the Met Gala. And what that's done for us is it gives us not only that whole design story, but to also talk about the manufacturing process of how during that project, you were so great Eric, of printing all these coupons in diff erent fi nishes, because that was important to Zac to see and touch and feel, what was in his head and how it could possibly be in real life. And just the whole value of the manufacturing process and then the options that you have to change your design, from what is in a 3D CAD model to what would actually come out of the printer and after post-processing.

What kind of takeaways has Protolabs had or been able to use this engagement in relating to their process or their customers?

EU: Yeah, so it was a di erent sort of project for us. And really, I learned a lot about juggling three parties, you had us and GE and Zac Posen, and then us really fi nding a path forward on that project that all of us could fulfi l, and like you said, learning from that project, maintaining the timeline was a struggle for that. And good planning really paid o on that project. And leveraging risk mitigation, as well, and it was fun, because I felt like I was on the opposite side of the fence for once. Usually, I'm the one servicing the product developers and the people trying to push these products out. And now I'm in that seat, feeling that pressure, feeling that heat of 'oh my god, we got to get this in the next week or two, or the project sank or our timelines going to get pushed, we're gonna have to make sacrifi ces somewhere else.' And so, rapid prototyping for risk mitigation. So it's like, we want option A, B, C, or D. And let's just print A through Z, and see what comes out on the other side. That was fun.

You mentioned the petals. I remember, I was working with Sarah from GE, and Zac and we were like, how thick do we want these pedals to be? Because you go too thick, and it's too heavy, and it's clunky, and you go too thin, and it's too delicate, and it's just going to break. And we ran prototypes to test it and I remember our fi rst pieces were about eight inch thick, like right at 0.125 inches, and we felt it and we said, alright we can go a little lighter than this and we shaved it down. We looked at the math, basically, if you send those petals out by the width of a sheet of paper, it was going to take a pound o the whole dress. So even just shaving that tiny little extra bit would make a signifi cant di erence in how comfortable and how well the model can move in it. And I felt like we dialled that in really close to the edge in the end. And it was just funny, we're doing the same thing aerospace engineers are doing on a rocket but doing it on a dress.

SDP: I don't know Eric, if we ever shared with you, during the process, as we were going through that light weighting and iteration of how the petals would fi t. So, Sarah and Shannon, who both worked on the project from GE, they tried to put the gowns on themselves to a certain extent, and we would put we put the petals around us and think, how does this feel? How could we move in this? And then we'd come back, and they would make some adjustments to the model and send it to you and say, well, we tried to take

some weight out in these couple of areas, or we change the overall shape, because we just don't think it's gonna fi t and we'll be able to move quite like we thought. So that was one of our behind-the-scenes moments, if you will, of everybody trying on the diff erent items just to get a reallife experience of how somebody could possibly move in these in these clothes.

EU: Yeah, I was gonna ask you about the cage, or the chest piece, for the rose gown, because I wasn't involved that much with that particular component. Was that one printed with E-Beam, electron beam, if I remember? SDP: Oh, the under cage. I believe we printed it in the Q 20 Plus machine with titanium. And we went like round and round of the best way to design that because even though titanium is lightweight, it was still really like a big thing of weight to have to carry. And so we went round and round on the diff erent attachment methods of the petals. The best way to give Zac a little bit of modularity because we knew he would be very used to being able to shift and move fabric in a way to get the exact aesthetic that he wanted. But he wouldn't be able to do that with a 3D printed petal so much. So those are really the critical requirements of what went into that cage from a design perspective. How can we get somebody modularity and the placement of the petals, and then take as much weight out of it as absolutely possible, which was why we went with that really organic looking shape, almost camo style, with those big chunks of pieces missing. But even with the cage, size of the machines became a limitation. So, we didn't have the machine large enough to print the entire cage as a single piece or two pieces we would have needed. So, we had to really print them in very small sections, and then bolt them together. EU: Yeah, I remember seeing online, someone mentioned, kind of an armchair engineer, he said, 'Oh, I think those petals are held on with neodymium magnets'. He's like, 'I can tell just by looking at it', and I loved that. That was hilarious.

SDP: We thought about magnets at one point, that just didn’t seem quite as fool proof as the bolts did.

EU: Right, right. I remember Zac, like I said, he thinks of things in movement, you know, in a way that we typically don't in 3D printing. And so, he wanted initially for the petals to kind of have a fl utter to them or to move a little bit. And we knocked around ideas of printing in like a TPU lattice or something to kind of act as a cushion, and things like that to get that movement. But it was just going to be such an engineering challenge, I think, and we were really concerned with the petals clinking and clacking together to eventually do that. But it was still really impressive that it came together the way it did.