February 13, 2017

The Fashion Design Program has recently acquired the Digital Clothing Suite (DCS), several new state of the art 3D fashion design computer programs from Professor Hyeong-Seok Ko, Director of the Digital Clothing Center in the Graphic and Media Laboratory, Seoul National University, and the Physan company. DCS is utilized by the industry to create and simulate fashion design on a virtual model, creating savings in costs and freeing up time for designers to explore and create. Professors Kathi Martin and Jaeyoon Jeong will be integrating the software with the Fashion Design curriculum and will also apply it to the graduate work with the Drexel Digital Museum Project, an international, interdisciplinary group of researchers focused on production, conservation and dissemination of new media for exhibition of historic fashion that collaborates with Drexel’s College of Computing and Informatics, the College Arts & Sciences, the iDEA E-Repository, and the Fox Historic Costume Collection; Seoul National University; the University of New South Wales, Australia; the Fulbright Foundation; and the Costume Society of America.

Martin's team has also created prototype 3D interactive media, OBJECTVR, that allow the viewer to be an active participant in the exhibition of historic fashion. Produced with GigaPan technology, rich metadata descriptions of these media, mapped to current standards of archiving, ensure their persistent discovery, access and conservation via iDEA, the digital repository of the Drexel Libraries Group. They plan to integrate the ObjectVRs into interactive, 3D panoramas of historic spaces and research what is learned by the visitor from this virtual environment.

Physan is currently collaborating with Hewlett Packard Enterprise to create the Avatar Platform, which builds 3D models of people that can then be digitally clothed and animated. Working from the original manufacturing patterns for the clothing, DCS can simulate the appearance of the finished article, specializing in details down to its drape, the way the fabric folds and curves as it hangs from the body. Avatar Platform will be used to reduce the cost of returns from online clothing retail and in the gaming industry to enable player’s digital avatars to mimic the player’s body shape and appearance.

Graduate Fashion alumnus, Dr. Kan Hosup, Dean of the Department of Fashion Design, Graduate School, Hongik University and an active member of Korea's Project Runway, will be a visiting scholar in the Graduate Fashion Program this spring-fall terms during which he will research the East meets West aesthetic and use the DCS to create virtual simulations of his design research. He is currently hosting a Korea Craft and Design Foundation Hanbok (Korean traditional costume) project in collaboration with legendary designer Carolina Herrera at The Museum of Art and Design, New York.

Image credit: Fashion design created in the Digital Clothing Suite by Fashion Graduate student Sherrie Cheng.