Monomaterial Bra Concept
Responsible Innovation Projects
The starting point of the project was the observation that the fashion industry remains largely unchanged since decades. Fashion items, or wearable are super difficult to recycle, which leads to the majority being landfilled. We have known this for decades and we still manufacture the same way. Since it’s difficult to change a whole industry all at once I was looking for an item, which is very commonly worn and hasn ́t been redesigned or rethought much. Therefore I chose to work on a bra. Bras are on average made from 5 different materials and 15 different parts, according to a disassembly study made by the Radici Group. The reason being is that a bra has to do many things at the same time. It has to be soft in some places, to create comfort. It has to be stable in others to create support and it should be stretchable/ flexible to adjust to the body. The traditional way to create all of these functional aspects is by layering different materials with different properties over each other. Metal wires for stability, foam for softness and stretchable fabrics to create flexibility. The downsides of this traditional way of constructing are the difficulty to recycle the object in the end of its lifespan, since it ́s a multi-material construction. Moreover is the assembly, in this case sewing all the parts together, super labour intense. As a result this work gets mostly outsourced to 3rd world countries. A third problem resulting from this traditional way of constructing is the use of standard parts. This does not allow for much customization. Standard parts are needed for the organization of a supply chain, but the body doesn’t come in standard sizes, therefore bras often don’t fit correctly. In this project I set myself the challenge, or asked myself the question: how could a bra look and feel like, being made with modern production techniques and modern materials? Could the previous mentioned aspects be improved? The Monomaterial Bra is a vision of how bras could be manufactured in the future. Utilizing a robot arm, soft and hard layers of TPU can be extruded over a curvature, resulting in a Bra purely made from one material. Therefore the construction is easy to recycle. The process itself does not involve the need of labour and the absence of standard sizes/parts allows for more customization. The choice to work with TPU was made, because it ́s a plastic with many properties. First of all TPU can be made from beans, it can be recycled and it can also biodegrade within 3 to 5 years. Technically TPU consists of linear segmented block copolymers, composed of hard and soft segments. By varying the ratio of these segments an enormous variety of different TPU can be produced. Basically TPU can be both: super soft and stretchy, but also hard and rigid + everything in between. That being said I saw the opportunity to create stable structures, such as an underwire of a bra, but also soft, skin friendly structures from only one material. In the process I utilized a 3d printer to create a variety of tests. In these tests I explored the options for soft, almost fabric like structures, but also created hard, stable ones. The most promising tests of these different structures were then fused together in one design, to one bra.