YouTuber Matthew Trahan has made a career out of 3D printing increasingly unusual things. He has printed musical instruments, bedroom furniture, and, in one particularly memorable video, himself.
His latest project is a full outfit, from shirt to shoes, belt to glasses, because apparently nobody told him 3D printers are for creating engineering prototypes or structures that aren’t otherwise feasible, not for fashion week.
So how did it actually go, and what did it cost?
Trahan’s checklist for his latest video included ten items: a shirt, shorts, shoes, socks, a belt, a hat, a wallet, a bag, a tie, and glasses. He couldn’t print all of them successfully, though.
The shorts, in particular, look like they belong to a Minecraft character. Some of the results were genuinely interesting, especially the Waveform shoe design by Stephen Drunks.
On the cost side, however, the numbers tell a complicated story. The filament came to about $100, which might sound like a bargain until you add the Prusa Core 1L printer he needed specifically to print the shorts, which costs $1,999. He used several different machines across the project.
Is this actually the future of DIY fashion?
Trahan also spent 33 hours on modeling all the different items, but that wasn’t all. He also spent 560 hours, or about 23 days, printing all of them.
Using a power cost estimator, electricity for the 560 hours comes to about $13.30 at the US average rate of $0.16 per kilowatt-hour. The EIA’s April 2026 figure puts that average slightly higher at $0.19 per kWh, and Californians pay nearly $0.38 per kWh (via Gizmodo).
So, we’re looking at $100 in materials, $1,999 in equipment, 593 hours of your life, and a pair of questionable shorts. All the patterns are still available on MakerWorld if you want to give it a shot, but it might be an expensive affair.
