What if I told you that within the next decade
you could be spray painting on your clothes every morning instead of, you know, getting dressed
the boring, old fashioned way? Would you think I was crazy? Well, get ready, because by the end of this
episode, you might get yourself a glimpse into the future of your closet. And it's going to have itself a lot of spray
cans. Hello Internet! Welcome to Style Theory, the channel that
takes a can of silly string and calls it fashion. I have a question for you. Have you seen the viral video of the spray-on
dress? It’s a hard one for us to show on YouTube,
not exactly monetization friendly but we're going to do our best. At the Coperni runway show during Paris Fashion
Week, model Bella Hadid came out sans garment, not exactly the weirdest
thing that happens during a runway show, but what came next was one of the weirdest things to happen
during a runway show. Suddenly, she's swarmed by people using what looked to be heavy duty
air brushes, and they start spray painting on a dress, but not using body paint. Instead, what they create is a fully formed,
tangible dress out of what looks to be silly string mixed with paint. Then another designer comes out adjusting
the shape. The whole demonstration took less than 20
minutes. It even earned Bella the Model of the Year award at the 2022 British Fashion
Awards, which yeah, apparently is a real thing. Most of the response was: “Whoa, that's
so cool. I want to wear that.” But you know me, I wasn't going to be satisfied until I knew
how they did it and whether this could be the fashion revolution that we've been waiting for. So today I'm here to answer the question: Is spray on clothing part of our fashion destiny,
or was this just a one time runway stunt designed to get Da Views over on Instagram? While Coperni was the one to bring the spray-on dress to the runway. They didn't do it alone. Collaboration between multiple companies in
the fashion world is pretty normal, especially
at Keystone moments like New York or Paris Fashion Week. Many designers collaborate with other companies
to produce the showstopping numbers that we see walking the runway. And in this case, the collaborator was a company
called Fabrican. The dad puns be strong with this one. And MatPat approves. This cheeky, quote-unquote fabric maker was founded by a Spanish fashion designer
named Manel Torres, a.k.a. The Chemist Tailor. Which can I just say, such a cool nickname! It's kinda like Heisenberg, but wearing something much better than tighty-whities
and chinos. He came up with the idea of being able to spray on your clothes
while attending the Royal College of Art in London after he saw someone using a can of
silly string, or, as he likes to call it, ribbon spray. And it made him rethink the entire idea of
how fabric could actually work. You see, the fabric we wear every day from your shirt to your
socks is usually made by weaving strands of different materials together and interlacing them in
a grid pattern to create a solid sheet of fabric. Making cloth like this is a whole fascinating
process that I won't be getting into today. But through the magic of physics, the interlocking
design of regular fabric allows it to be sturdy enough to hold its
shape while remaining flexible enough to wear and move in. How then do you produce woven fabric in a
can? You don't. You reinvent the process using science. I suspect that we're at the top of a deep,
deep fabric-in-a-can iceberg. And in order to reach the bottom, I need to
dive deeper and uncover all of Fabrican’s dark, dirty secrets. And boy, did I find the motherlode. Theorists, allow me to introduce you to the
patent for Fabrican. For those of you who've never known the joys
of reading patents, consider yourself lucky. They are boring. A snooze fest. But they do contain a lot of information that
we need to figure out how this spray-on dress actually
works. Since patents are made to help people own
the rights to their specific designs and to keep
people from copying their homework, so to speak, it needs to contain all the minute details
about the thing being patented from how it works, how it can be used, and how it differs from anything
else out there on the market, which is perfect for us. So let's get to reading. Mm hmm… Uh huh… Yep. Still boring. Okay. Here we go. According to the patent, calling what comes
out of the Fabrican a fabric is being pretty loose with
the definition. As I touched on earlier, fabric, as we normally refer to it, is made up of
long woven strings and material. However, that's not what Fabrican does. Fabrican uses short fiber strands, and I mean really short between 0.02 in 0.15
millimeters in length and then glues these little strings together using polymers. Polymers are just a general term in chemistry and materials science. They cover an enormous amount of stuff that
we use to make everything from plastic bags to heart valves. But at their core, they're basically long
chains of repeating sections of molecules connected into one long
string similar to the beads of a necklace. These polymers are acting as a binder for
the fabric strands, and according to the document, they can be made from things like latex or
polyvinyl acetate, which you probably know better by their common name. Good ol Elmer's glue. Who would’ve suspected that the future of fashion is actually just a 2014 slime tutorial? The last ingredient chillin in the can is arguably the most important because
it's the one that lets the whole process work. That is, the solvent. The solvent's job is to keep the binder and
fibers from mixing together too early. In the case of Fabrican, that solvent can
be made from ethyl acetate or acetone, a.k.a the same stuff that's used in your everyday
nail polish removers. Which means that while the dress may make you look like
the belle of the ball, you're probably smelling more like Harley Quinn after her acid bath. Anyway, this mix of fibers, binder and solvent is what gets sprayed out and stuck
to your skin with those giant airbrushed looking devices that we saw them use on Paris Fashion Week. The solvent evaporates as the spray leaves
the nozzle, letting the fibers and binder finally meet
and mix to form the fabric like a really scientific and fancy papier maché. As for what kind of fibers you can make your outfit in the can items from? It seems like you're not limited to just one
type, as listed on page 7 lines 5 through 20 of
the patent, you can use anything from cotton and wool, which are pretty typical fabrics that you'd
find in your closet to aramid fibers most often used to make bullet resistant body armor. And if you keep going all the way to the bottom of the list, you can even make it out of glass
and metallic fibers. You heard that right. Glass and metal fibers. Can you imagine stepping up to get your #OOTD
sprayed on and instead you're just getting pelted with thousands of tiny
little glass shards? talk about death by a thousand cuts. Now, for those of you who might be thinking
I'm being a little harsh here, since fabrication lists that it can be used
for things other than clothing like coverings for furniture. Nope. Still not seeing a world where I want to plant
my butt on an office chair coated in metal and glass shards while I sit through
yet another nine hour title thumbnail meeting. That is my literal nightmare. All joking aside, though, they're not wrong
about the versatility of Fabricant, it is nearly limitless. While Torres designed Fabrican to be a tool
for his fashion dreams, anything you can imagine that
uses some sort of fabric-like substance could simply be sprayed on. Aside from clothes and seat covers, Fabrican
claims that it can be used to make consumer products like
sponges and towels, automotive interiors, art, even potentially used to clean up oil
spills. Yeah, right? Not too shabby. To do that all you have to do is just follow
their diagrams, which are giving off some serious IKEA vibes, until you've
even extended the use of Fabrican to include the medical field. According to Fabrican. You can create medical patches, bandages, casts and masks that are just sprayed directly
onto the patient, making them custom fitted. And it doesn't even stop there. So mix stuff with the fabrics and binder and boom, you can have a new way of delivering
medications to patients with just the spray of a can. On paper, this stuff is basically a one stop
shop for all your fabric needs, but the flexibility of the fabric usage here
isn't the only selling feature. Fabrican also aims to turn the tide on sustainability. Even looking at the demonstration of this
stuff on the runway, it's immediately clear how it would be so
much better to have the ability to make clothing in the exact size and shape of the wearer instead
of mass producing huge numbers of pieces, only to hope that they manage to fit the majority
of consumers out there trying to buy it. There also seems to be relatively little waste
of cloth in this demonstration, which played directly into the sustainability buzzword
that's been looming over the fashion industry over recent years. In a world where people are throwing out an
estimated 92 million tons of textile waste every year, a fabric that wastes less
material? That could be a Game Changer. Shout out to Sam Reich. On top of also not using as much material
to create a garment in the first place. Another massive selling feature of Fabrican
is that it can actually be reused. Yeah. As in melted down and re-sprayed again. Fabrican states on their official website
that the goal is to quote: “provide industry with production processes
that reduce environmental impact.” Since it primarily uses fibers recycled from discarded clothes
and other fabrics. Each Fabrican item can be worn and washed just like a normal garment. Yeah, I was surprised by that one. And once you've tired of your runway dress or
your custom pair of spray on JNCO jeans, you can then break it back down into its base
parts of fibers and binders, add the solvent back in and spray the same
material time after time after time, creating completely new items. Kind of like a reusable 3D printing method. I mean, this sounds like the most revolutionary
material in history, right? So why is it just in a specialty runway presentation and not in
your closet right now? It sounds too good to be true. Well, yeah, kind of. Looking at all the benefits seems great. But it turns out that there are plenty of things that Fabrican fabric can't
do. But hey, before I go pouring one out for Fabrican I think I should take a minute to hit that
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so you don't miss when we dive into the science behind what color goes best with your skin
tone, or whether Peach’s parachute dress can actually hold up in real life, you do
not want to miss anything that's coming up, my friends. And now back to the episode. The first thing I noticed while watching the
initial video from Paris Fashion Week was that the dress
was quite form fitting. And while Miss Hadid looked comfortable. Not everyone is as body-con positive. Some of us prefer a little bit more room in our personal style, a little more
flow. So I wanted to know what other Styles Fabrican could actually do. And it turns out it’s a lot of the same
thing. Dresses much like what we saw on the runway or skin tight shirts. Not quite the versatility that we were promised. Then again, I can probably forgive this one because Fabrican
suggests they can make different sizes and shapes using robot arms and molds to apply the fabric. But now let's look at the application. It took two artists around 10 minutes to apply just
one dress and another person to come in and make the alterations. While the final product is truly stunning. It was still just a dress with no zippers or buttons, no real layers, no
cutouts or embellishments other than a head hole. And no laces, fringes or anything else with actual
style. Just a covering for the ol’ bod. As we see here from the 2010 Science and Style Show, you
can make some pretty wild shapes using Fabrican. But they require essentially sculpting out each shape
individually. And the pieces don't exactly come out feeling organic or natural. As an everyday person who’s not the craftiest, see also my craft challenges on GTlive. I'm not going to be able to make something like this. So the only way that Fabrican works for me
is if there's also a designer/architect/papier mache champion also in the can. Otherwise I'm just going to wind up as a first
grade art project. And all of this is without mentioning one
of the biggest considerations here, the actual durability of the fabric, which seems questionable at
best currently. In this image from the same fashion show, you can see that Bella Hadid's dress
has already started to tear in the corner after she's done something extreme, you know, she walked. And this doesn't bode too well for any uses
of Fabrican other than experimental fashion. Could you imagine spray on sportswear, kids
clothes, even basic clothing for dancing? Anything that requires any movement could
immediately damage the fabric, and the only way to repair it
is to melt the whole thing down again. Speaking of Wearability, that actually is probably
the biggest elephant in the room with Fabrican, the fact that it's not just made from fabric,
it's also made from polymers. Now polymers are amazing, great, super flexible building blocks of chemistry. They're also completely non breathable. Remember when I said the polymers used in
fabric are similar to Elmer's glue? Well, have you ever worn Elmer's glue? It’s not what you'd call the fabric of our
lives. There is a reason glue is great at sticking
things together, mostly because it's nonporous and forms a tight seal. But wearing a material like that is going
to feel a lot more like a wet suit than a slinky evening dress. I'm sure Bella Hadid was happy to have something
nice and insulating to wear out there on the runway
after standing around in her skivvies for 20 minutes. But in the real world, anything made out of
polymer materials is likely going to be something you're sweating in and then getting
stuck to as you're left to marinate in your own clothing. Sure, it might look good on the outside, but
a couple of minutes in this stuff is probably going to be pretty awful. And finally, I should probably mention the
cost, which Fabrican seems to keep hidden away at the bottom of the can. The only price tag that I could find was in an article from 2010 saying it could cost
$15 a can when it released next year. Next year in this case, meaning 2011. But there is no indication of how many cans are needed to make a single garment. Is this a one-can-fits-all situation? I don't think so. There were two at least half gallon jugs of
Fabrican sitting on the cart next to the model in the runway show, and they sprayed
for almost 20 minutes straight, leaving me to believe that this was a pretty serious
commitment in terms of materials, given that there are no benchmarks out there in the space,
I’m guessing that price is not a selling feature that they want you thinking about just yet. So I'm going to assume it's not an accessible price point for consumers outside of Paris
Fashion Week. Does all of this mean that Fabrican is a lost cause? No, not at all. I'm not here to crush Fabrican’s dreams
of changing the world. I'm just here to put the viral marketing through a
real world lens and remind everyone on the Internet that if it looks like something impossible
is happening in a video that you saw online, then something impossible is probably happening
in that video that you saw online. Even though Fabrican has been kicking around
for over two decades, it's still very new when compared to the tens of thousands of
years that we've been using things like cotton and wool to make fabric. And the patent itself even admits that rigorous testing has to go in to find the correct binder
and solvent for every type of fiber. They also have to do more experimentation
to nail down the right ratio of the different ingredients that'll produce a usable form of clothing. Like all attempts to overhaul a centuries
old industry, it's going to take time. And hey, if Fabrican would like to send me
to the Streamys this year in a suit made of wool
and glue, I am here for it. Just give me a few months heads up so I can try to work towards
something closer to Bella Hadid's figure. I'm looking more like Bella Ha-dad at the moment. But hey, that's just a theory. A STYLE THEORY! Keep looking sharp. And hey, if the science of fabric tickles
your fancy, click the box on the left to find out what the Hulk's pants would really have to be made
of. or click the box on the right to find out if you can actually be allergic to color. As always, my friends, I will see you next
week.
