We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Lilach Porges a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Lilach, appreciate you joining us today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard.

Very different from the traditional standard of designing and producing clothes in the fashion industry, I 3D print garments with robotic arms. The robotic arm is a machine with many advantages over a 3D printer. For instance, it can print a large-scale whole piece, meaning very large garments in one piece, with no need to assemble small pieces later. Another advantage is that the robotic head tool is changeable; therefore, it can print new sustainable materials differently. For example, it’s possible to connect a pellet printer to the edge of the robot.

My process begins similarly to the standard by sketching forms and shapes on paper. Still, it takes a turn swiftly to design and 3D model the garment in Rhino and Grasshopper, which are software usually used by architects. With this software, I also export the code for the robotic arm. I find a material I want to work with that is as sustainable as possible and has the suitable properties to become a garment. I connect the correct robotic head tool to the robot and start printing. At this point, I sit next to the robotic arm and watch it print, ensuring it’s not making mistakes, which I fix when necessary.

A few months ago, I received a request from Instagram’s design account to create an original video (reel) to share. I wanted to show my distinguished process of designing and producing a dress, from sketching to the photoshoot. Around that time, a material company I had worked with before, Xtellar, told me they had developed a new sustainable material named GR605EVA-BIO, which is a bio-based EVA derived from raw sugar cane. They sent me a bucket of pellets from this material to try. I took the material, my design, and 3D printing code to the New Bedford for Research and Robotics in Massachusetts and started printing. It took five days in total to experience the new material and printing technique and produce the dress. I was delighted with the result; therefore, I organized a photoshoot with a model, photographer, and makeup artist.

Seeing this new material shaped in my design on a beautiful human walking and moving was such a moment of happiness. This video was posted on Instagram’s Design account on September 7th, 2023, and it achieved more than 150,000 views and 4000 likes.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

The strongest memories of my childhood are the ones in which I was cutting and piecing together old fabrics and clothes in my room, sculpting new silhouettes of garments around my body.

However, I was always drawn to mathematics and computer science, but I never felt complete when choosing between art and science. I decided to study architecture because I believed it would be a good combination of logic and creativity, and it would open my mind to new ideas.

This proved to be true when I was exposed to parametric design, 3D printing, and new technologies such as robotic arms. As someone who always dreamed of being a fashion designer, in the back of my head, I couldn’t help but think about how to take this new knowledge to the world of fashion.

This is why I combine fashion with technology and research more sustainable production methods to create the fashion of the future. My work centers around developing innovative methods for 3D printed garments with robotic arms, exploring architectonic shapes with the ambition to bring the worlds of science, engineering, and fashion together to empower women.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

There are a few problems of unsustainability in the fashion industry of today. Three main issues are a long time of production, Tons of waste, and sweatshops. The amount of time spent designing and producing a fashion collection is very long – sometimes, it takes up to 20 weeks. About 90% of fashion production ends shortly as a waste of raw materials, defective products, unsold inventory, and used clothes. Unfair wages and conditions in third-world countries’ fashion factories are very well known, but there’s not enough improvement.

My main goal is to solve those problems by revolutionizing the fashion industry with 3D-printed garments with robotic arms. One method I developed will print a whole dress in one day, with no need to assemble pattern pieces together, meaning the time to design and produce a fashion collection will drop from weeks to days.

The opportunities to use new sustainable materials that haven’t been used before for fashion are endless. In addition, this method will print exactly the amount of material needed to create the garment, with no leftovers that will go to waste. Moreover, 3D printed materials are easy to recycle completely. Therefore, any used dress will be welcome to be recycled in the factory.

Because the process of producing garments will be more automatic with this method, the factory employees will have much better conditions of operating and watching the robots instead of harming their eyes and back in the process of sewing a dress. They would work fewer hours with higher wages. Furthermore, the factories can be located closer to the consumer, making fashion on demand faster and returning or recycling possible.

With my work with robotic arms and sustainable materials, I won the sustainable fashion/textile category in the Arts Thread and Gucci’s Global Design Graduate Show 2023 competition. More than 5,000 design projects from across the globe submitted work, making it the most significant online showcase worldwide. It was judged by 175 highly esteemed judges across all categories.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I learned the beauty in the imperfect result when I started 3D printing fashion with robotic arms. The robotic arm can follow any line in space according to code. I draw a line and code it for the robotic arm. This line can be designed by code, meaning it can be as complicated and accurate as a mathematical function can be. My mission was to achieve the highest level of accuracy. However, during the experiments with this new technology, on the way to print accurately, I found out how beautiful the mistakes of the robotic arm can be. Just like handwork and craftwork, its imperfections have their own uniqueness. Therefore, I have decided I would like to combine the accurate prints of the robotic arm with the random ones – showing the process of innovating new technology to create new applications. Those “happy” mistakes are what make my designs distinguished.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.procodedress.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lilachporges/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lilachporges/

Image Credits
Robotic arm: New Bedford for Research and Robotics Material: Xtellar Photographer: Felicia DiSalvo Model: Trinity Chisholm Makeup artist: Maggie Meza Barboza