"Style icon Dita Von Teese debuted a 3D-printed dress at the Ace Hotel on Monday, born out of a collaboration between designer Michael Schmidt and architect Francis Bitonti. Schmidt, well-known for designing Lady Gaga's famous bubble dress, worked with Bitonti, a Brooklyn-based architect who renders designs with new technologies in unusual material — this time to make a 3D-printed dress from hardened powdered nylon that still allows for movement. "We were an interesting team because I take things that are virtual and I figure out what to make them of," Bitonti said. The dress was created virtually. Schmidt designed the entire dress on his iPad and communicated with Bitonti through Skype during the process of imagining 17 unique pieces and 3,000 joints that let the dress move with the body." - × × ×

“Francis added, "The curvature is always changing as she moves. As far as difficulty goes, if you could imagine creating a piece with 3,000 unique moving individual parts.” - × × ×