Danit Peleg graduated from fashion school just three years ago and is already making a global name for herself with her unique approach to garment design and production. “I have always been interested in being part of the whole process of making garments,” she says, “starting with laser cutting, knitting machines, and digital printing. But I wanted go further for my thesis project, and had the idea of printing a complex fashion line from the comfort of my home in Tel Aviv without any sewing required.”

Tel Aviv is a great city for exploring new ideas. It’s known as a very innovative city with lots of resources for getting technical advice. It also has a maker space that allows people to come and experiment with new technology for free. Peleg continues, “when I realized 3D would be my research topic, I went there and tested a few desktop 3D printers with all different types of filaments. I started off without knowing anything about 3D printing, and within nine months, I had developed a recipe for a way to make 3D printed clothing and created five 3D printed outfits, including shoes, for my thesis. There was no one else to learn from, so I had to come up with everything on my own.” She used a MakerBot printer with PLA filament for the shoes, and Witbox printers for the fabric.

By then, Peleg had six desktop 3D printers running in her house and a process that no one else had shown online. “I did have a few inspirations that led me to go into this field and to test this technology,” she explains. “The first time I ever saw 3D printing in fashion was in 2013 when I was doing an internship at a fashion house in New York’s Chinatown. It was a very avant-garde fashion house, and I worked on their collection that had two 3D printed dresses. They were amazing, but they were made from hard plastic, and there was always a lot of stress around breakage as models wore them. And it was very expensive. Then a friend gave me a 3D printed necklace produced with less expensive, more friendly printers. I then had the idea that I could design anything I wanted and print it from my house.”