DIY Dress Design: Clever Color-Your-Own Clothing. Remember those fun color-it-yourself books from your childhood? Sometimes they were color-by-number and other times, well, they invited you to simply pick your own color scheme (which some of us did with color-by-number books regardless). Taking this simple idea to a new level, one designer has come up with an idea to let people color their own dresses and other apparel.
Her dress design ideas, however, do not end with just color – Berber Soepboer has also created a series of dresses that are designed to change color and pattern by snapping and unsnapping selective buttons and recombining layers in various ways. More than merely these (albeit creative and appealing) designs themselves, this design approach signals new ways of thinking about what we wear – they provide a new perspective on the possibilities of transforming, multipurpose and create-your-own textiles. DIY Dress-Up Ideas: 5 Sexy Ways to Upcycle Old Clothing.
Upcycled designs often emphasize radical do-it-yourself transformations, but some of the most simple ideas can have dramatic impacts. These clothing conversions illustrate the ease with which people can upcycle ordinary objects and make them extraordinary, turning formless junk shirts clothes into elegant tops, bottoms and sexy dresses.
Mari Santos does more than just recycle small-scale clothing extras into new, well-fitting and sufficiently stylish upcycled outfits – she shows how much potential exists in upcycling extremely plain everyday objects, things we would normally trash without a second look. A baggy t-shirt is one of the most ubiquitous items of excess clothing you can find in almost any closet. These ill-fitting and over-sized extras have a lot more potential than most people realize – from make-your-own dresses to two-piece tops and much more. Transforming Fashion: Multifunctional Clothing Designs. Azumi & David are always working toward new and ever more weird and wonderful fashion designs that boggle the mind and defy conventional rules of style.
Some of there most fun and engaging work revolves around convertible clothing that serves multiple purposes and easily transforms to serve its various functions. This hat-to-handbag design concept is not subtle about its nature, looking like a handbag on your head when worn as a hat and looking a lot like a hat when held as a handbag.
Some of their designs convert more for mobility and storage, such as pants, scarves and other clothing items that pack down into tiny portable easy-to-carry pockets. Ever experimentalists, these designers often end up with designs that look half-finished or seem to be the by-products of fashion gone wrong or the remnants of other designs cobbled together in curious ways. Comfort Clothing: Creative Scarf with Built-In Speakers. Compact Cork Tent: Easy & Eco-Friendly Camping Cylinder. Titled ‘Tree House’, this clever little mobile sheltered is named after its constituent material rather than its location – composed of sustainable cork it is a flat-pack portable dwelling made to replace conventional synthetics-based tents.
An award-winning design collaboration between Ana Correia, Vasco Lopes, Vera Gomes for Dideia (via YankoDesign), it is chemical-free and environmentally-safe, lightweight and portable, and utilizes the positive thermal properties of cork to its advantage. Like an ordinary tent design, it rolls and folds into a compact and simple-to-store form that can be deployed as needed, and unwinds into a cocoon-like cylindrical shape with built-in insulation, breathable flaps, a small porthole for light and views and a custom-fit bedroll and pillow inside. Awesome All-in-One Backpack, Jacket & Tent Design. Transforming Jacket-to-Backpack-to-Pillow Design. Transforming Drip-Free Umbrella-in-a-Handbag Design. Like the proverbial mouse trap, it seems like everyone is always out to design a better umbrella. While many of the results are more focused on novelty and form than function, some combine style and substance in an appealing and pragmatic way – such as this transforming umbrella-into-a-bag idea by Seung Hee Son.
The portability is of course the first and most obvious benefit of this design but certainly not the only one. In addition to collapsing into an easy-to-carry handbag, this umbrella inverts as it does so – thus, it captures the water on the inside instead of letting it drip within whatever interior space you are entering. Moreover, the designer has thought out how the transformation process will work on a step-by-step basis to ensure that everything can be done in a dry, comfortable and easy way with one hand on the handle and the other hand performing the conversion without getting wet.
Upcycled Skirts: Umbrellas Converted into Colorful Clothes. Like designing your own styles to dress in but not skilled with complex stitching or comfortable with creating new patterns? From their shapes and size to their scale and appearance, skirts and umbrellas have a lot in common – except, perhaps, that when it comes to an umbrella the interior is designed to be seen publicly and thus is as carefully considered and crafted as the exterior … whereas, well, looking up a skirt … that might get you in trouble.
But seriously: used umbrella material is a perfect choice in many regards to upcycle into a skirt, dress, other easily-planned piece of refab clothing, as designer Cecilia Felli discovered during her creative umbrella-to-skirt upcycling experiments. Moreover, since umbrellas are well known for breaking down, this provides a simple do-it-yourself way to take advantage of something that frequently falls apart. Umbrellas come in all kinds of colorful, creative and unique patterns that convert readily into skirt material for women or girls.
Shelter. Bio-Accessories: Funky & Eco-Friendly Fashion Designs. Some will no doubt say that this is green fashion gone a bit too far – but what fun is always being eco-friendly at the expense of creative, unique and personalized style? In densely built urban environments many of us rarely have contact with nature, hence the idea to make a series of simple fashion bio-accessories that each have an organic living element within them.
The idea is that each piece brings some aspect of nature to the wearer, from the chirping sound of a bird to clean air breathed in from attached plant life. Philosophies aside, however, this is a series of funky fashion-for-thought design statements that are designed to engage the wearers as well as observers around them.
Bag. Customizable Clothing: Unique 120-Zipper Dress Design. This convertible dress design by Sebastian Errazuriz is nothing short of stunning in any of its possible stylistic configurations. The wearer can simply zip and unzip along any of the horizontal zipper lines to convert their clothing in a matter of seconds. What might be most remarkable about this design is how quickly it can shift from elegant to sexy, a full-length, single-piece dress one could potentially wear to work into a skimpy, short-cut, two-piece number that could put some bikinis to shame.
In between there are any number of other options for shortening the top or bottom or even leaving some zippers partly on and partly off. Despite the obvious benefits in terms of variable style, temperature and so on there are some clear drawbacks to this design as well. How much cold metal can you, after all, take on your skin? And do you really want to give any passerby 120 ways to undress you in the blink of an eye?