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Lana Dumitru and Vlad Tenu are an unlikely team of makers. She is a fashion designer. He is an architect. She lives in Portugal. He lives in England. She works with fabrics. He works with large architectural installations. But these are the kinds of unexpected combinations that bring to life surprisingly delightful results.
In this case, the FORAEVA project, which combines traditional Romanian designs with tech elements.
The unusual pairing doesn’t stop at the design, but also seeps into the materials and technology used to create these wearable art pieces. For instance, a dress they created for Bjork a few years ago, was made from 25,000 Swarowski crystals that were painstakingly added to the dress by hand, one by one, by Lana and her team. And it took FORAEVA to finish. (Just kidding. It only took about six months.) That dress is an engineering marvel, created by Vlad in a way in which the frame that supports the crystals also holds the dress together. It now lives in the Swarovski Kristallwelten museum in Austria, and in case you’re thinking about stealing it, just know that it weighs over 20 pounds.
Their current collection uses another new (to fashion) technology: 3D printing on fabric. The design process goes from the initial concept trough a “tech translation” for lack of a better word, which takes the traditional motifs and designs and maps them onto 3D shapes that are then printed by a specialized printer onto the fabrics. The end result is something that looks like a traditional Romanian garment from a distance, and reveals itself as an intricate three-dimensional artifact when you zoom in. The details are not only meaningful (because, you know, words…) but they also mimic the depth of the ancient cross-stitching patterns in form.
The 3D printing technique creates a bas-relief effect, adding depth to the designs and paying homage to ancient stitching process.
Referring to their creations as “wearable art pieces” is more than apt, especially after their showcase in New York City left many asking, “How much does this dress cost?” — a question that, amusingly, they couldn’t answer.
