UAE students discover an Innovative and Fashionable use of DuPont™ Tyvek®

DuPont, one of the leading science companies, recently  supported an innovative fashion workshop at Zayed University in Dubai, United Arab Emirates [UAE] using DuPont™ Tyvek®, a lightweight and durable synthetic fiber to design clothes. The workshop was organized and conducted by Anne-Cécile de Chaumont, Professor of Space and Product Design, for a group of thirteen students.

Led by Anne-Cécile, the participants experimented and explored Tyvek®, which has rarely been associated with fashion. Being water resistant and versatile, Tyvek® is typically used for industrial packaging, protective covers, protective apparels, graphics, medical packaging and protective membranes for buildings. Globally, Tyvek® has been popular with fashion designers due to its strong properties of being breathable, lightweight and easily printable, which prompted Anne-Cécile de Chaumont to plan this workshop.

For the first time in the UAE, this fashion design project was executed over eight weeks by the fourth year students of visual arts, interior designing, animation and graphic designing. Interestingly, none of the students had a background in fashion designing. The all-females group worked in teams to complete the project. The students were required to experiment Tyvek® and explore different transformation processes by selecting the most interesting shaping process. The students created samples and organized photo shoots exploring the properties of Tyvek®. During the last two weeks, they worked on enhancing the aesthetic and technical value of their designs. DuPont also shared Tyvek® handbook and samples to further help student understand the technical and aesthetic properties of Tyvek®.

Richien Ravi, Marketing & Sales, DuPont Gulf commented “Tyvek has been primarily recognized for providing protection, security and safety to a wide variety of industries. We are delighted to collaborate with Zayed University and share DuPont science with our students. They are our future and we are glad that DuPont™ Tyvek® is being applied in fashion designing and helping them experience a new and challenging approach to a creative process”

Anne-Cécile de Chaumont, Professor of Space and Product Design, said “I offered this Fashion Design Experimentation workshop in France two years ago with my colleague Mathieu Buard. At this time we already used Tyvek®. What is really interesting in this workshop is that the students learn to experiment a new material and to improve its properties. This is amazing to see how creative they can be when they let the material itself induce the design.

Although applied here in the Fashion Design field, this material (Tyvek®) combined with this creative process (experimentation) could also apply in other matters – such as lamp design, furniture design, tablecloth, scenery structures… as this is a really versatile product. I would like to thank DuPont Middle East and Zayed University for making this workshop possible. I am also grateful to the students who really get involved in this project and produced a work of publishable quality”

With foldable property of Tyvek®, the students designed dresses of different shapes and scales. “Using different techniques like basic folding, cutting and gluing, the students were able to explore the endless possibilities of Tyvek®. We have once again seen an innovative use of Tyvek® through this workshop,” concluded Richien Ravi.