Crystal Dress was showcased as part of NuVu’s Fantasy FashionTech Collection on the runway at the Emerging Trends Show during Boston Fashion Week 2014.

The ultimate goal of this dress was tying nature into fashion and to represent the formation of crystals through a dress. The triangular formations on the dress are created out of mirrored acrylic and screwed onto a felt base. The dress is a great representation of the crystals formed in nature, brought to a modern, sleek environment like fashion week. 

By creating the dress, we are showing people that nature can be brought into fashion. Not only does this dress display crystals but it also makes a statement. When people first hear about a dress made out of screws and acrylic, it may not come across as the most attractive piece of clothing, but this dress changes that perception. When it was worn at fashion week by our model, Natalia, it was a very different piece of clothing from everything else that was shown during our show: Boston Fashion Week's Emerging Trends. 

This project was important to us because we were inspired by the idea of crystals, minerals and rocks. Although the dress does not represent the minerals and rocks as much as the initial sketch had shown, the dress accomplishes all of the goals we had. Through lots of prototyping and many different dresses, this was the final product that we could not have been happier with. 

We started off the project by coming up with ways to represent crystals minerals and rocks in a dress. At the time we were unsure of what we wanted our dress to look like, but we just started to sketch ideas and look up images online that inspired us. We were drawn to crystiline structures. After a bit more research we decided that we wanted to use mirrored acrylic mixed with some sort of base material, such as felt or spandex. Our first prototypes were made of paper, then wood and were all based around an original design that we made of the layout for the pieces. We eventually decided on using black felt as the base and having certain areas by covered in the acrylic and some just be felt with the pattern cut into it. The acrylic was attached to the dress by pre cut holes we had made in the pattern. In the end the dress combined the beauty of nature and the modern mood of the city into a good looking creation.