Fashion Tech Couturier Maartje Dijkstra, Designing with the Future in Mind

Fashion Tech Designer Maartje Dijkstra's latest project is a performance piece that is individualistic, sculptural and progressive in nature.

It has been ten years since Dutch designer Maartje Dijkstra started her high fashion/couture label. Sculptural and progressive, the talented fashion tech couturier creatively combines fashion with technology to create beautifully handcrafted pieces inspired by electronic music and individuality.

Fashion Tech
“”The light coloured sculptural dress is built of white and light silver unique leather and finished with hand stitched silk and polyester wires and white manual 3D printed lines” -Maartje Dijksta

A graduate from ARTEZ/HKA Arnhem in The Netherlands, the Fashion tech designer obtained a Bachelor in Fashion Design in 2006. It was while studying that she honed in on her unique approach. Since then she has created interactive performance pieces for the runway like -Denzipfaden (2012), Obstruction (2012), Hard Core Vein 1.0 and 2.0 (2014), Braindrain (2016), Surface Distortion (2016), 3DDD( 2017) and TranSwarm Entities (2017). Her latest piece is Optic Traces.

3D Printing Fashion Tech With a Wow Factor

Optic Traces is the former Alexander McQueen intern’s latest project. First presented during GOGBOT, in September 2017 in collaboration with Con-seq and C02RO, we recently saw it at Dutch Design Week on 23 October 2017. The wow piece combines high fashion with special manual 3D printing techniques that involved Maartje using a 3D printer pen as a progressive manual tool to construct illustrative lines, structures and surfaces.

The bold piece, is a handsome garment inspired by the Baroque period, living nature like coral, ‘dead nature’ like ivory and dark electronic music. Maartje explains “The light coloured sculptural dress is built of white and light silver unique leather and finished with hand stitched silk and polyester wires and white manual 3D printed lines that contain traces of squared mirrored surfaces.” She adds, “The many special grey blades that are covering the whole dress are printed in 3 layers, 2x white and 1x black, that together form an almost icy/frozen colour effect. The grey printed Cristal’s in between the blades form traces of simmering light and will break the light into different eagles.”

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Optic Traces is a performance piece that welcomes stares from observers. It is unique and has the most beautiful detail. If you can make it to Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven to see Maartje Dijkstra’s Optic Traces, then make sure you do.

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Founding Editor in Chief at FashNerd.com | editor@fashnerd.com | Website

Founding editor-in-chief of FashNerd.com, Muchaneta is currently one of the leading influencers writing about the merger of fashion with technology and wearable technology. She has also given talks at Premiere Vision, Munich Fabric Start and Pure London, to name a few. Besides working as a fashion innovation consultant for various fashion companies like LVMH Atelier, Muchaneta has also contributed to Vogue Business, is a senior contributor at The Interline and an associate lecturer at London College of Fashion, UAL.