'Not uncomfortable' Lego dress fashioned from 12,000 pieces
A clever Lego builder becomes an innovative fashion designer by weaving fabric from Lego pieces.
Move over, Oscars red carpet, we've got a dress that blows your designer duds out of the picture. Lego builder Brian D'Agostine spent four months weaving specialty Lego pieces into a wearable dress so his wife could attend a Lego convention in style.
The little black dress is made from about 12,000 individual Lego Technic pieces. Lego Technic is a series of interconnecting plastic rods and parts used to create complex models, often with motorized and moving parts. For the bulk of the dress, D'Agostine used around 7,000 Technic liftarms, pieces with rounded ends and holes running down the middle.
The entire dress weighs about 7 pounds (3.2 kilograms). There were quite a few challenges involved with building a Lego dress that wouldn't fall apart and that would actually look like a fashion item. D'Agostine's wife wore a spandex underdress to ward against any potential wardrobe malfunctions.
"I finally broke the dress into a bodice and a skirt. They each rested on different parts to distribute the weight better," D'Agostine, told CNET's Crave blog. "The resulting fabric was very barrel-shaped. With less than a week to go I experimented with pleats and was able to get the skirt to rest on the hips rather than rely on friction."
D'Agostine, who is known as Dag's Bricks in the Lego community, also built a Lego handbag and strappy shoes to go with the dress. He wasn't content to just outfit his wife. He made a matching bow tie, glasses and belt set to go with his own outfit. As a couple, they looked very "put together" while attending Bricks Cascade 2016 that just concluded in Portland, Oregon.
Anyone who looks at the dress is first going to think "wow" and is then going to ask, "But is it comfortable?" D'Agostine relays this review from his wife: "On the first day my wife answered the comfort question by saying, 'It's not UNcomfortable.' By the second day though it seemed to be fitting better and she agreed that it was comfortable, though maybe not for frequent use."
So there you have it. A little black Lego dress really does work. You can wear it. You can even wear it all day, but it might not become a part of your main fashion rotation. But if you ever needed to accept an Oscar for a Lego movie, this would be the frock to wear.