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Video of Awesome Shape-Shifting Mannequins for Fashion Designers

Furniture designers need chair bucks, and fashion designers need dress forms. You’ve undoubtedly seen the armless wireframe torsoes that the latter uses to create patterns and test how fabric hangs and fits. It’s an indispensible piece of kit for fashion designers that don’t have patient, unemployed roommates.

The problem with dress forms is that we’re not all the same size. Some feature some measure of adjustability, like collapsible shoulders, or dials you can turn that draw the internal components tighter or looser to change shape. 

Other systems come with a series of pads that the user can painstakingly add in order to mimic a particular body style. 

But the bottom line is, if you’re a fashion designer hoping to cater to a number of different sizes, you must purchase a lot of different dress forms.

A professor from Hong Kong named Dr. Allan Chan hopes to change that. Chan, who works at Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s Institute of Textiles and Clothing, spent five years collecting anthropometric data from around the world, then designed a single mannequin that could embody an extremely wide range of sizes. Check this thing out:

Imagine the process of taking a single dress on and off of a half-dozen different mannequins to see which it will fit, versus simply putting it into Dr. Chan’s i.Dummy, as it’s called, and adjusting it on-the-fly. The i.Dummy is obviously faster, as it takes no more than eight seconds to morph from any given size to any given other size. It’s also more precise, as a multitude of dimensions can be individually dialed in.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that the i.Dummy was invented in Hong Kong, which is notoriously tight on space. If they switch over to Dr. Chan’s invention, “workshops or shop-floors won’t have to stock mannequins of different sizes,” he says, “which often take up lots of valuable working space.”

In addition to the space issue, I think the i.Dummy could be a boon to the individual small-shop fashion designer seeking to develop an online custom couture business. If a customer in a remote location had the means to accurately measure themselves, then e-mailed those dimensions to the designer, the designer could then use an i.Dummy to craft clothing with a perfect fit, and ship it off to the customer with no in-shop visit required.

However, I realize that fashionistas are picky about fit and particularly how garments hang in motion. Clotheshorses among you: Would you be confident enough to send your dimensions along for remote manufacture, or do you feel you’d still need to try something on to check the fit?