In their sophomore year, Cornell University alumni Brandon Wen and Laura Zwanziger designed a plus-size dress form for their product development course. Now, their class project is on display at the largest art museum in the country.

Wen and Zwanziger’s plus-size dress form, named “Tolula,” is featured in the exhibition “Items: Is Fashion Modern?” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City until Jan. 28. The exhibition features more than 100 items that reveal the complexity of fashion in relation to culture and technology over time.

Their class assignment in 2013 was to create half-scale samples of a product line for an underrepresented demographic in the fashion industry. Wen and Zwanziger decided to work with plus-size design, but faced the challenge of not having any plus-size mannequins to work with. Since Cornell, a peer institution to Syracuse University, did not have any, their professor, Susan Ashdown, suggested they make their own dress form.

The project was a combination of creative design and significant research. Wen and Zwanziger analyzed the plus-size fashion market, discovering how plus-size shoppers are often overlooked. They also researched issues that women in the plus-size range are facing.

“The biggest issues that we were seeing were that it’s not just about size, but it’s about shape,” Zwanziger said. “We decided to design for the pear shape because that is the most common body shape in the plus-size market.”

To create the dress form, the Wen and Zwanziger searched through Cornell’s collection of body scans from their 3D body scanner.

“We chose the body type that was as different as possible from the average dress size in terms of proportion and size so that we could try to find different shapes and dress styles for a completely different body,” Wen said.

After the designers chose the body scan of a size 24 woman, they took the cross section of the body and divided it into layers. Each layer was cut into foam pieces with a laser cutter, then stacked together and covered with soft material to create the dress form.

Through their design, Wen and Zwanziger aimed to create a dress form that was more proportionally accurate for plus-size women. The sizing reflects a realistic shape, not just a “bigger version of a smaller body,” said Wen.

When the designers received an email from the Museum of Modern Art earlier this year, it was a complete surprise. Wen was shocked, initially assuming that “there must be another MoMA.”

“Tolula” is not one of the stand-alone pieces in the exhibit. It is part of a segment on “dress meets body and body meets dress,” which encourages thought about “the relationship between body and clothing and whether it’s art and whether it’s fashion,” Zwanziger said.

“It was such an unbelievable outcome to something that was so personal and spontaneous,” said Wen. “It wasn’t anything with the intention of being more than sophomore year term project.”

Although they aren’t entirely sure how the exhibition curator found “Tolula,” Wen and Zwanziger believe it was a result of press coverage following the completion of their dress form. New York Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen Magazine, Huffington Post and The Wall Street Journal all published articles about their design.

Wen is currently studying design in Belgium, focusing on menswear. Although he would like to return to plus-size design in the future, Wen acknowledges that “it’s difficult in Europe to do plus-size because it has a completely different reaction than it does in America.”

Zwanziger’s fashion interests lie in body-positive design. She designs for a variety of body shapes with the aim of “designing specifically for body shapes as they are and not with an expectation of how they should be.”

Published on November 27, 2017 at 10:13 pm

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