Margarita Medvedeva

Margarita Medvedeva graduated in Design for the Fashion System at Politecnico di Milano in 2015 and is currently working as a 3D designer in a fast fashion company.
Recently more hands-on modeling with mouse and keyboard, she strongly believes that the future of design is in the right mix of aesthetic sense and innovative technologies. Technology enthusiast, she lives in the first person the evolution of design and production processes in the fashion world with great enthusiasm.

Design of a sportswear collection through virtual design tools.

In winter sports athletes must face problems and difficulties. One of the main problem and inconvenience, related to movement and “sliding” at high speed, is the possibility of falling. While for serious falls already exist on the market protection, backpack with airbag and mountain security sistem, for minor falls there’s less attention and few protections available. This kind of fall happens very often among among athletes, who frequently counts only on the padding of their clothes to soften the impact. Nevertheless, this clothes aren’t design to take care of this function. Today, paper pattern for winter sport clothes are optimized to fit togheter with the athletes’ body while moving and the material, padding and production details are studied to guarantee the best possible comfort, transpirability and freedom of movement. This project aim to complete, whith the structural study of the paper patter of winter cloth, garment with protections suitable to reduce damage from minor impacts, without being awkard o hampering the movements. The protection, integrated in specific transparent pockets, and the garment itself are designed using a prototyping virtual software, that allows a new approach to the design of garment and an immediate visualisation of the final wearability. The approach to the virtual method is analyzed during the design process. The several elements of protection are developed from the paper pattern study by a 3d software, taking inspiration from space and spacesuit. The elements are independent from the garment and the choice is up to the final consumer and his needs, in a custom-tailoring process similar to the assembly of a spacesuit for the astronaut. 3d printing grants autonomy to the final user, that is able to print the needed pieces based on his own needs, not only buy them. The prototypes, that are virtually and concretely realized, were evaluated to find the most suitable material through test of elastic resistance, time evaluation and print cost.