Dior || Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion

The Metropolitan Museum of Art approached The Factory NYC regarding an interactive area of their exhibit. They wanted to showcase a black dress decorated with black leather floral elements designed by Raf Simons. The dress is a priceless piece of history, and the Met wanted attending guests to get a sense of “feel” for the dress without damaging it. After discussing with Drew Wolk and Jacob Garcia we decided to make a flexible wall tile that captured the floral elements of the dress to scale. We initially created a tile out of an SLA resin to capture as much detail as possible. Following this we created a silicone mold and poured in a jet-black silicone that was able to conform to the walls of the event space. The second element was a scaled down maquette of the dress that sat within a niche which was also covered in flexible wall tile. I recommend that we print the dress out of nylon powder via an SLS printer. This would ensure that the dress and all its small features would be resilient to individuals touching it, this and that SLS nylon produces and ultra white finish naturally which worked well with the jet-black background. It was tough finding a vendor that would be willing to print this.