SYNTOPIA DRESS BY IRIS VAN HERPEN

This exercise is an animation of the potential design process and development of Iris van Herpen’s Syntopia dress that first made its appearance at her Fall-Winter 18 collection. The dress features a lot of complex curves that are inter connected by sub curves and arcs that form surfaces to cover the body following a radial pattern. 

https://www.irisvanherpen.com/haute-couture

Iris van Herpen Syntopia dress

DESIGN PROCESS

The first step was to create the curves that radiated from a single point. This was done by assigning various sine and cosine functions. This gave the resulting curves a wavy form similar to the original piece. The length of these curves fit anthropometric requirements of the female body. Then it goes onto dividing the curves into various segments from which arcs are constructed both in the x and z directions. These arcs are made by catenary arches whose degree of curvature can be increased or flattened through graphs. The resulting geometry is then mirrored and offsetted so as to accomodate a human body in the space between. This gap is then covered by lofting the curves on the edges so as to make a comprehensive garment structure.

 

ANIMATION

The animation is done by mapping the process from start to finish- how the curves generate from a point till the end when they are ultimately lofted. The animation also shows how variations of the dress can be made by changing the sine/cosine equations as well as varying the parametres that determine the length, degree, height etc of the curves. The animation also features a woman at the end to visualize the scale of the dress.

 

VARIATIONS

The length, degree and angle of the curves are few parametres when changed can produce variations for the same dress. This can be easily done as the symmetrical nature of the dress provides for an efficient way to create new designs from a few parametres.

Syntopia Dress

 

MAA Computational Design

Faculty: Rodrigo Aguirre, David Andres Leon

Student Faculty: Daniil Koshelyuk