I'm really interested in how they made this a "dress" and not "pants". That is, from the Instagram video, Bella Hadid comes out completely naked except for underwear. You can see as they're spraying that she's keeping her legs close together, but still in the final scene where the assistant cuts the slit up the side, the dress then hangs like a "normal" fitted evening gown. I feel like they must have skipped over some parts about how they kept this "silly string" from getting stuck between her legs.
In the video it looks like one of the assistants sprays across the front of her legs, but from the side, so that a lot of strands are crossing the gap in her legs. Only then they moved around the front and started applying over these supporting strands.
Since we are on Hacker News, I will say that this is not only a very cool technique in the physical world, it's also an amazing pattern to have when writing algorithms: think about your "support" and your "feature building" as potentially separate passes.
Say you have a bunch of dynamic business rules that you need to apply onto a calendar of days, or a canvas of spreadsheet cells, or another discrete collection of slots where information could go, or even a continuous domain (in all of which some type of gap-filling and continuity might be desired).
Rather than looping in one pass over your rules, and trying to figure out how to simultaneously fill gaps and write meaningful information into specific places, it might be helpful to first pass over your rules and think "where is the support area that might be needed, all of the places where some rule or combo of rules might write information." After all, if you're just thinking about support, you can trivially combine things, because you're just applying some kind of union operation as you go along.
Then you can do another pass, where you worry about order and precedence and complex inter-rule interactions, while knowing you already have a pre-made "canvas" on which you can paint and - in the real-world analogy - play with color and texture and all that fun stuff.
Of course, you no longer have an algorithm that can handle streaming data, but two passes are still O(N), and the resulting code can be infinitely more readable.
(To the mathematicians out there, I do apologize for being inspired by, but completely ignoring the nuance of, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Support_(measure_theory) - but I think it's a useful mental model even when generalized in a less-than-mathematical way!)
Two passes can be far more efficient if you take memory layout and pagefaults into account.
Same logic as to why you can assemble a set of identical pieces of IKEA furniture faster if you first do step 1 for all pieces, then step 2 for all pieces etc, than if you assemble the pieces one by one.
> (To the mathematicians out there, I do apologize for being inspired by, but completely ignoring the nuance of, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Support_(measure_theory) - but I think it's a useful mental model even when generalized in a less-than-mathematical way!)
Mathematician here. We steal real-world terms and use them in technical ways all the time. It's OK to use real-world terms like "support" non-mathematically.
It looks like she stands with her legs pressed very close together so that there's not really a chance for the material to form a pant leg. Towards her ankles it looks like pants do start to form but are cleaned up by assistants:
Her legs were close enough together & the stuff was being sprayed at such an angle that it wasn't wrapping around individual legs in any meaningful ways.
Maybe it's both, as in the substance completely fills all the available space, like a triangular wedge. We can't really see the underneath of the dress.
If it's like fiberglass you can shoot it thicker to create a bridge of webbing, then spray finer material over that base webbing and essentially create a fabric
Came here to see if anyone else was getting a strong Silly String vibe. So far, no. It really looks like it to me, except I suspect a lot more adhesive (to itself) than Silly String, while remaining "not too adhesive" to skin.
From the article: “Originally, the spray-on dress started with a can of silly string. “I thought I could create a mist,” mentions Torres in a 2013 TED Talk. “That was the eureka moment.” he adds. The technology can be used in fashion to not only create dresses like done on Hadid, but also to repair any damaged items.”
Busted. Definitely skimmed this article and watched videos! Thanks for pointing that out. Really interesting evolution of the technology, especially how it becomes cohesive and creates a surface.
Silly string was my first thought because my friends and I used to try (semi successfully) to make costumes applying it like they do. It worked best with a near empty can when it comes out fragmented like in the video.
Now if only we had been more glamorous about it we could have beaten this company by 30 years!
The same book came to mind, but in the context of bodypainting. How long before we can make an inkjet body painter--I'm thinking of some print arms that rotate around the body on actuators that keep them very close to the skin. Careful motion tracking of the body to ensure it's spraying the right bit of skin as it moves. (I have a hard time imagining a printer that's fast enough to hold a position for, not to mention the need to breathe.)
And where exactly does that fall in terms of indecent exposure? Make sure the bits that the law requires covered have solid patterns at that point, it seems it would be legal.
(On the other hand, I have doubts about the practicality of wearing body paint in ordinary life--what can be durable enough to take what life routinely dishes out, but easy to remove? He also missed the fact that people only in bodypaint should follow nudist convention and sit on a towel.)
I don’t think that wearing a tight polymer/sprayed on clothing is a good idea like at all. Various issues arise, e.g. maintaining hygiene and overheating. Also it may look cool, but I bet that subj dress actually felt awful (not that fashion models weren’t used to it).
I doubt she was wearing it for very long, nor does it appear thick. I doubt there's much in the way of thermal problems. For hygiene--it's simply a dress. I see no reason she can't lift it like any other dress.
Any risk of inhaling those fibers becoming an issue in the lungs? Wouldn't want this sprayed on me and it found out to have the health effects that asbestos does.
As a reference point: the protective bags around monitors and other easily scratched products tend to be "non woven fabric". If you look closely you can see the fibers are going every which way, instead of being in a regular pattern like woven or knitted fabrics.
I avoid synthetic fabrics to begin with because in a fire they turn to melted plastic and cause instant 3rd degree burns. Natural fabrics will char, protecting you a little bit in the process, and simply not make your injuries any worse. This spray fabric is sure to be far worse, an absolute nightmare in the event of fire.
Are you a fire performer, chemist, or otherwise intend on being around fire a lot, or is this just a general precaution?
I mean, I do the same, but that's cause I play with fire on a regular basis, and haven't met anyone outside those circles who care about such features as char vs melt.
If you've ever actually burned a fleece accidentally you will find they just shrivel up a bit, they don't catch on fire very easily unless you throw them in one.
When they "shrivel up" the fabric is actually melting. Melting into your skin is what turns a minor burn to turn into a life-threatening 3rd degree burn. "catch on fire" is NOT the danger.
As you say it does not catch on fire, there is no danger in wearing a fleece while sitting next to a camp fire; there is a danger in wearing a fleece while sitting in a camp fire.
I've worn a fleece that got burned while I was wearing it, one time while tending to an open fire, another time with a soldering iron, in both cases it clearly did not want to propagate, I just ended up with a small patch of shrivelled up fleece/hole that didn't stick to my skin, in fact I'm pretty sure the fleece saved me from a burn in the case of the soldering iron... I'm sure that if you were fully engulfed in flames for long enough it would start to stick to your skin (which is not exactly an exclusive property of that fabric), but that's not what you were suggesting.
They mention the obvious medical uses like spray-on casts and spray-on bandages, but what about spray-on physical restraints? Or spray-on condoms? Get creative, think outside the box.
> The biggest problem, however, was that the drying process took 2–3 minutes before the condom was dry enough to use, which was too long to be truly marketable.
A larger version that can be blasted like a foam cannon into a large mob could provide for efficient crowd control when you need to arrest multiple people at once.
Also comes in spray form. It's particularly useful for superficial but large scratches you want to protect if you want to go swimming because it creates a waterproof skin layer (I used it during a beach holiday a few years ago and it totally saved my holiday).
If this can be de-composed and reconstituted, it starts to look like a Star Trek replicator. It could have some wild implications for fashion where "yesterday's" style can be remade into tomorrow's trendsetting look overnight.
> integrated with diagnostic devices that can monitor the health of the wearer
Wtf? What grim meathook future establishment would involve wearing spray-on smart clothes that monitor my vitals? Need to know so I don't accidentally go in there.
There's a lot of people that would find that useful. I.e. diabetics that need to monitor blood sugar levels comes to mind but I'm sure there are other medical conditions were it'd be helpful to continuously monitor some vitals. Fall sensors for people that are prone to falling and who might need help if they fall is also another use case.
They created a traditional design. But that design is what it is, because of limits of fabric and construction. I'd like to see what could be reimagined using this - strapless, or interlocking, or multiple-tiled-pieces, or what? Let's see no more ordinary strap-over-the-shoulder sheath dresses.
Some quick googling indicates that asbestos brake pads are pretty rare these days (USA). Still can be a concern for mechanics who clean brake dust with compressed air though.
The applicator looks to me a lot like a HVLP (high volume low pressure) gravity fed paint applicator, which I have used to spray automotive paint. In that scenario, compressed air is used as propellant.
The propellent is just regular air, compressed to maybe 20-80 psi. I'd be more worried about the solvents that make this sprayable but then dry within minutes.
I've never heard of arachnophobia being a fear of webs rather than, you know, the actual arachnids. It's utterly bizarre to me that that would be GP's first thought...
Right, but even if that was how phobias work, which to my understanding it's not, it still depends on being afraid of the spider to be afraid of the web, while the poster above is implying there are some people who are primarily/only afraid of the web.
3D has specific meaning in fashion/apparel (such as "3D patterning"). It refers to construction techniques that create shapes other than a bunch of naively connected tubes. For example, articulated knees/elbows or darts. https://www.arcteryx.com/ch/en/explore/obsessive-design/arti...
The high score your snarky comment has is amusing as I remember a top post fro earlier in the year with vocabulary words that HN readers were below-average in comprehension (compared to e.g. the average woman), and many of them were fashion terms like "peplum."
This news item was extremely viral, it was all over Instagram.
It makes sense for Wired to write about this just for clicks, (as evidence being linked here). No need to be a submarine - those are for un-viral subjects.
And at some point in your life, you probably sucked on some bare tits cause you were hungry and couldn't yet eat solid food. Was that situation pornographic too? Or could you possibly recognize that not every situation where boobs can be seen is sexual?
Yeah, it's a stretch. Applying stuff to your body that then cures or hardens is not new but I guess in the past it's always been for molds (sculpture, prosthetics) but in this case the 3 dimensional thing is the direct result, not an intermediate step. I would like to see something a bit more than skin-tight clothing to call it a real 3D production process.
I do think it's cool, though. My body is too crap to pull somehting like this off, sadly.
And even if you're a female-attracted allosexual you can still be interested in the technology.
People always used to say nobody actually reads Playboy for the articles--except it's clear plenty of people did. My mother for one--she read the *braille* version, it didn't even contain descriptions of the pictures let alone pictures. (Braille versions of books/magazines typically contained descriptions of pictures since they obviously can't contain actual pictures. With Playboy the omitted the pictorial articles entirely.)
There's a quote along the lines of "an intellectual is someone who has discovered something more interesting than sex". I don't think asexuality is that relevant here, it's likely just that people have other interests and are not browsing HN for sexual gratification. Even in articles explicitly about pornography, the tech implications are generally more interesting (imo) - if you're interested in nudity, that's easy to find. None of that has anything to do with being asexual, but maybe it means people here are less likely to have a one track mind
> Was this really a moment to bring awareness to asexual people
The purpose was not to bring awareness (I do not care about all this awareness virtue signalling), but to come up with a hypothesis for this observation.
I also wondered why the model and the person who applies the spray-on dress on her do not wear some kind of protective mask (like varnishers do for their varnishing work) while the spraying work is being done.
Reading up on the stuff that's actually coming out of the can, it doesn't look like there are particles that are small enough to actually aerosolize into the air. They tout wool and mohair as candidate things that can be sprayed.
> Reading up on the stuff that's actually coming out of the can, it doesn't look like there are particles that are small enough to actually aerosolize into the air.
I have my doubts whether breathing the small fibrous particles that are contained in the spray won't have some unhealthy consequences.
Ok, then show me that. That is interesting. Show me a painted-on body suit after ten trips through the washer/dryer. Who cares about some spray-painted model?
consists of short fibers bound together with polymers and bio polymers, and greener solvents that evaporate
So he shredded fabric and mixed it with paint. Who thought this drivel was newsworthy?
> It will form a layer of glued-together unwoven fabric...
Yes.
> ...like the one on Hadid's body
Absolutely not. If you watched the video, the end result was a garment that was not stuck to the wearer. The straps were independent from the shoulders. The rest of it flowed and fluttered like real fabric, and not like the typical "spray on dress" we've seen before. It's not a coating once finished. It's a separate thing.
Notice how the fabric didn't cling to her inner legs, but bridged that gap instead.
Now I agree that I'd like to see how durable this thing is once it's been washed. I'll accept whatever wash method is standard for a fancy dress. That is: if it can't be tossed into a normal washing machine, but can be handwashed with Woolite in the sink, then that's good enough for me.
I think it adheres somewhat/partially to skin. When the assistant slides down the first shoulder strap in the video, there seems to be some resistance, as if the material was gently stuck to the skin and then lightly released/pulled away. That seems consistent with the Fabrican webpage, which says that the fibres "adhere to each other and to the surface sprayed". I imagine that there's a portion of the video not shown where the assistant gently tugs other parts of the fabric away from the skin.
