As fashion evolves to be more digital, more AI generated- where does this leave traditional design? Those which are lovingly crafted with a skillful hand? Those which hold stories whispered by our ancestors?

I set out to create this Lunar New Year Dress to figure out the technical method to incorporate these intricate traditional Chinese embroidery motifs. This dress is based off Indonesian Chinese wedding dress’s which have taken the cheongsam and elevated it. This dress features a Dragon which represents this year’s zodiac animal and you can’t have a dragon without a Pheonix to be harmonious.

The base garment created in Clo3d and then fitted onto a custom mannequin. I researched and optimised each embroidery element to ensure it aligns with traditional design styles. The motifs were then assigned a colour in Adobe illustrator which I then used to create grayscale maps. Iana Van Aken took over here in Adobe Substance Designer. She created the embroidery elements using these maps, layering node after node to achieve depth and the photorealism seen here.

Next we had to figure out a method to apply these techniques. We consulted with technical artist Tom Henniger whose expertise was essential in figuring out a workflow for Substance Painter.

Now for the background, we created a depth map in blender and used stable diffusion to create a texture, projecting it onto our scene in blender. Our biggest hurdle was developing techniques to optimise the rendering process to ensure we could still have our 8k-4k maps without crashing every 5 minutes.

Digital fashion is often associated with simplicity, futurism, puffer and hypebeast style creations. However, digital tools should be recognized as a fantastic way to showcase intricate elements of high fashion and preserve traditional and artistic techniques. 

This garment isn’t about marketing, commercialism or NFT’s. Rather simply, I’m convinced we’re going to be missing out on something precious; Because in the heart of heritage, beauty will always be found.