Danit Peleg started making her own clothing when she was 9 years old, using her mother’s sewing machine and old bedsheets. Twenty years later, the sewing machine has turned into a printer and the fabrics have changed from household linens to FilaFlex, a thermoplastic elastomer-based polyurethane. If you’d told 9-year-old Peleg that she would one day become the first person to sell 3D-printed clothing online, she probably would have laughed — but that’s exactly what the 29-year-old is doing.
Peleg grew up in a suburb between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and got an early glimpse of 3D-printed fashion during an internship at New York City’s Threeasfour fashion collective when she was 25. She remembers the finished product — made from hard plastics — was breakable and the materials scratched the models. So when she began printing as a final project for a class at Shenkar College in Israel, in 2015, she made the fabric a priority.
