Designer Profile 2023: Nell Rydzewski

This past Sunday I had the pleasure of meeting Nell Rydzewski for the first time to discuss the upcoming fashion show which will feature some of her pieces which explore the intersection between fashion, technology, and functionality.

Tell me a little bit about yourself

Hi my name is Nell! I am a junior here at Uchicago. I’m an economics and cognitive sciences double major. I’m originally from Louisville, Kentucky which is THE city in Kentucky in case that provides you with any overview of that. I was originally a philosophy double major with economics, but I decided that I also kinda wanted some neuroscience exposure. They had just come out with the cognitive science major sometime last year, so I switched over as soon as I got the chance. Outside of strictly school work, I have always found myself enjoying taking advantage of the MAAD center for laser cutting, 3D printing, all that sort of thing. So eventually I thought, this might be cool from an outfit design perspective, so I applied for MODA.

Amazing! So you are a new designer, did you have an interest in fashion or design before you realized how 3D printing could play a role in the process?

Kinda. Ok my Pinterest is kinda weird right now, and has always been. But since I always liked doing little projects and using the MAAD center, and I kept finding myself hopping onto Pinterest pages that show wearable tech, eventually I realized that you could use 3D printing for things like mesh. Once I realized that those two things might connect, I decided I wanted to try applying and seeing if I could work those two things out myself.

So would you mind talking about your own personal style and how that compares to the theme and vibe your pieces?

So I feel like the pieces I was planning were originally a lot more similar to the style of how I try to dress, and they have evolved over the course of me actually making the design. Kinda what I’m wearing right now exemplifies my general style. 

She was wearing a black sleeveless turtleneck sweater with black loose athleisure pants. 

So I like a mixture of sportswear and tech kinda situation. I’m going to the gym a lot so if it doubles as something I can lift in it usually works as an outfit. I very much value function. For whatever reason, I gravitate towards black. My sister says it's because I have horrible taste in colors. Either way, black is usually the go to. So I was planning on things like that to use as my designs. I am currently designing for 1 male outfit and three female outfits. They were originally going to be all monochrome. The male would wear a black outfit, the females would have alternating black and white pieces. As it developed, it became, can I bring elements of colors to this? For instance, for the male piece black is the base but I'm using gold elements as a feature and the female outfits are going to have all different shades of metals: gold, silver, or rose gold. And so we will see how it will evolve. There is still a week left, there might be some emergencies. 

She laughs 

So far, my part of the show is taking inspiration from prosthetics and wearable fashion from a 3D printing perspective and different ways to print and use those kinds of fashion pieces and incorporate them to make really cool, futuristic versions of what humankind could wear in the future.

So how much 3D printing was part of your process?

I was basically printing non stop over the past 2 months first for the prototypes, then for the subsequent versions.  I was trying to restrict myself to only using one of their printers to avoid taking over the printers because of how long each piece takes to print. The primary feature of the male piece is a necklace that has a skeleton design on the back like a vertebrate “around” so that's three separate prints each necklace each of which takes about 13 hours. I was dragging all my friends to go with me to the MAAD center so that I could start a new print. That was day after day after day trying to coordinate the prints and get it done in time and checking that the filaments were working out. It was a whole thing. But we have gotten to a point now that I am fairly certain that we can move forward without needing a daily MAAD center printing.

Can you expand on some of the challenges you faced designing the pieces and then actually producing them and seeing the pieces on the models.

As I mentioned before, it was a hassle to coordinate the prints and ensure that different types of filaments were the best choice. Originally I was planning on doing a lot of black filament prints for the male piece. Previously all my prints using black filaments were really tiny so I didn't know how it would scale. It turned out that with certain pieces it is very brittle. I would print something and then try to take it off the mat and it would break in two. That was a significant issue and was partially why I switched to gold. There are theories that the black filament is made up of a bunch of scrap filaments that are then dyed black. It's kind of like recycled forks where if they are black it's probably recycled plastic. That’s part of the reason why it's supposedly more brittle when it's at those temperatures, and so that kinda compelled me to switch over to use fancy shiny filament that they couldn’t have possibly used before. It’s fresh. It's new. It's going to be good, and all those have been working like a dream.

Interesting. If you could go back and use black filament that wouldn’t be so brittle, would you have done that or stick to what you are doing now?

We’ll see what the final look ends up turning out like, but I think that the contrast that is generated with the gold is something special. All of my friends who I was bouncing my  ideas off of, thought that it was better to go with the high contrast. I said “ Ok fine, but you couldn't have told me that when I was telling you about it when I was going to do it all in black?” They said they were just being supportive.

She rolls her eyes and laughs.

But I think it was a good move in the end.

That’s great. Do you think that your interest in functional wear and 3D printing is rooted in a belief that this will be the future of fashion or is it just something that you think is cool?

For starters, looking at current prosthetics and human wearables that are supposed to enhance function, those things have always been around, they are just evolving . So if you take something as simple as athletic wear, which I mentioned I like a lot, they make products that wick the sweat away and things like that. It's not that large of a step to go to something like copper wearables that are supposed to alleviate pain. All of these different sorts of cool techy things have been very subtly woven into a lot of clothing and wearables, even smart watches are a facet of that. So I feel like on one hand it might not be as overt as I am trying to make it in the fashion show–I was going for an idealistic or more extreme futuristic version of that, but I think fashion is definitely evolving that way. We will see what happens in the next few years.

So where do you see your future with design in general going or fashion and 3D printing?

I don’t think it's necessarily going to become a full time career other than it leading to an idea which might lead to a business model. I might want to develop a product that I would then take to a company or start a company based on. It's always been a dream of mine to have an Etsy shop of some kind where I can create these kinds of things and sell them to customers and customize them.

Do you have any advice for someone who is interested in design and might not  know where to start and might not have done anything like that before, especially as a first time designer?

As someone who has suffered through it very recently?

I laugh and nod yes.

Me getting into MODA and becoming a designer was nothing more than a really fledgling idea that I had over the course of this summer. I would daydream about how I would do this and this if I were a designer and it made me realize, hey I could actually do this. I think it's just actually taking that step and not necessarily just seeing what happens, but in my case just taking it one step at a time. I’ll apply and if they like my designs then I'll focus on actually bringing those things to life. It became this scrappy one step at a time; let's hope it all works out at the end kind of process. I  definitely did not envision myself being a designer last year and the year before that and so I'm really excited that I'm actually doing it this year.