Hacker News Reader

Comment by icegreentea2 | Hacker News Reader

Finding more detailed information has been annoying.

From https://www.dezeen.com/2024/02/09/4d-knit-dress-mit-ministry... it says that the heat shrinking material is nylon, while the rest of the yarn is a viscose + polyester blend.

View on HN

I’m curious how the flexibility of the reformed fabric lasts over dressing/undressing cycles, garment care, and long term storage in a closet. If I’m not careful I can easily stretch out a well made alpaca wool sweater if I remove it too carelessly (from experience!). I wonder how fussy this is.

Also would like to know more about the machine. Many garments are knitted as tube-like structures just look at circular knitting needles, where does this differ and how?

It doesn't seem like this is intended to be reusable or even useful.

It's just a college design project that gets the attention of MIT branding.

Maybe so, but the 6-axis machine appears to be sitting in the front window of a store on Newbury St. (which is Boston’s high-dollar shopping area).

its like making nylon stockings but a dress, there is a video that shows the process that would answer a lot of your questions on the site near the bottom of the page

Ah very cool thanks!

Does that mean the transformation is permanent? Because if they created a dress that could be shaped, unshaped, and reshaped in different ways using, say, a hair dryer, they'd really be on to something!

I think it means that it's basically permanent - it cannot be unshaped. You can of course keep "tucking it in".

Need to include a few strands of something like https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/metal-that-rem... .

There are also memory alloys which can remember two states.

A similar concept is supertwisted nylon fishing line "muscles" which contract upon heating.

I think starfish muscles are contracted in the default/energy-off mode, so maybe we could make smart fibers which are actively elastic/"plastic".

Nylon is thermoplastic so in theory it could be reshaped but the filament would lose a lot of strength and durability in the process

It's a very cool idea at first, but how would it work in practice? Would your dress lose its shape if you wore it for a long time? Or in cold weather?

How disappointing. Today it's all polyester, polyester and more stinky polyester. Tomorrow the washing machine has it ground to dust already, forever. Lucky us, this single-use dress is of bespoke fit!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com