Sundance Bodice

The brief for this project had four  bullet points: apparel top, promote mobility, >70% fleece, and on trend for 2022. Apparel top and 70% fleece are pretty straightforward and since promoting mobility will probably come through material exploration, the remaining prep work was to nail down a few trends. A deep-dive into WGSN revealed a few takeaways when it came to 3D or insulative forms:

Avoid traditional fills
Comfort in repetition
Uniqueness in pattern deviation
Highly contrasted volumes
Targeted application

Smocking seemed like something that could fit the bill for the trends that surfaced. If you’ve not familiar, smocking is done by pulling fabric together in repeating patterns, usually drawn out on the back of a piece.

I tried out a few patterns to see how they moved. One in particular was very stretchy, which fit the bill for mobility. The three-dimensional shapes they formed also worked well to create insulation without the use of filling, which is usually the most environmentally fraught ingredient in warm apparel.

Smocking is usually completely uniform, but I figured that if I varied the amount of fabric that was pulled into the puffed out parts, I could contour the piece three-dimensionally. It also gave opportunity to create a one-piece garments that could accommodate a complex form.

I felt like this garment had the potential to be a little more avant-garde than technical. Where’s a better place to see how fashion, mobility, and insulation collide than at Sundance? The film festival happens every January in Park City, Utah. Hollywood shows up to strut down Main Street and attend screenings, parties, and after parties. A punchlist of words to describe the images below:

Young, steamy, aloof
Exclusive, private, guarded

I wanted to go for it and make a single, one-piece garment. I started by cutting a hole in the center of a larger swath of fleece so I could smock outward from it.

To get the piece to feel like it was rising up, I hung a mannequin upside down and worked my way from the waist down to the shoulders and neck. I wrapped over the arm hole locations and had all the fabric bunch around the neck, where I trimmed the excess off once finished. I cut the arm holes in afterwards.

I let the fabric start to gather into larger streams toward the neckline. The final piece took on a life of its own and was somewhat of a surprise to see when I flipped the whole thing right-side out.

The idea is that high collar gives a sense of guarded aloofness, but the open shoulders are more raw and energetic.

I’ll be updating this project soon. This post focused on the fashion aspect of a larger project that explored the viability of using human articulation data and body heat maps to intelligently smock garments with better athletic performance while forgoing petroleum-based synthetics.

The overall project was selected as the ski/mountain category winner of the 2021 Woolmark Performance Challenge by Thomas Moe (head of design at the Italian brand Salewa) in Paris in the spring of 2022. See the press release here.

Thanks to Shima Seiki, Studio Eva X Carola, Salewa, Rico Lee, and Woolmark for their helpful consultations on this project.