As many women know, it can be very difficult to find a dress that fits like a glove. Oftentimes, it can be hard enough to find one that doesn’t make you feel like an overstuffed sausage or like you’re swimming in a sea of fabric. It’s no wonder why dress shopping can take hours.

However, a new 3D printer could be the solution to every girl’s style troubles.

Nervous System, a U.S. design studio, has used 3D printing technology to create an innovative dress customized to a woman’s body. The Kinematics Dress, which costs a whopping $3,000 to produce and print, features 2,279 printed panels interconnected by 3,316 hinges, all completely made out of nylon. And it only takes 48 hours to print.

The creators of the dress call it a 4D dress since the garment, like fabric, can go from a compressed object to its intended dress shape.

The Massachusetts-based company has also created a smartphone and tablet app, which helps users to change the different components of their dresses. Users can manipulate the pattern, style and flexibility of the dress.

These special dresses are printed using a process called Selective Laser Sintering, which uses a laser to fuse together nylon powder to create a solid structure. Any unmelted powder that is left in between the gaps falls away after printing, which creates complex interlocking designs that can be worn right out of the printer.

Although each component is rigid, the hinged plastic parts allow the dress to flexibly conform to the body and flow in response to body movement, behaving as a normal fabric would, according to Nervous Systems’ website. However, unlike traditional fabric, this textile is not uniform; it varies in rigidity and flexibility, drape and pattern throughout the dress.

To ensure that the dress will fit every woman’s body, they are built using exact measurements — information that is gathered using body scans. Talk about a perfect fit.

So far, Nervous System has released a bodice (the first piece they produced), a single dress, several pieces of jewelry, and selection of homewares. The second prototype of this Kinematics Dress will debut at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.

In a world filled with people wearing ill-fitting clothes, the Kinematics Dress is the first step towards custom, proper-fitting attire. I, along with many other women, am tired of trying on dress after dress only to find that it’s too tight or too loose. Or even both.

The solution seems simple at first: have someone make you a custom fitting dress. But many of us don’t have the hundreds or thousands of dollars to throw away on a dress that we’ll be too nervous to do anything in for fear of getting something on it.

While the Kinematics Dress is still extremely expensive, it’s one of the first of its kind and is still under development. Many products — clothing included — are most expensive when they first come out. Hopefully, with the development of more advanced technology, exploration in ways to cut costs of production and higher demand, the price of the dress can decrease to one that’s more affordable.

A benefit of the Kinematics Dress is that in using the app to design the dress, you can see what it would look like on your body. Shopping can often be difficult because it is hard to picture how flat pieces of clothing will look when actually worn.

Hopefully Nervous System will soon be able to develop other clothing items besides dresses, such as skirts, tops or even pants. While dresses are definitely the first step to better-fitting clothing, they definitely aren’t the last.

I’m optimistic for the future of 4D clothing and wearing clothes that will actually fit me, and all women, properly.

Alexis McDonell is a junior magazine journalism major. Her column appears weekly in Pulp. You can email her at admcdone@syr.edu.

Published on January 8, 2015 at 5:29 pm