3D printed – Matthew Trahan tried to make a full, head-to-toe 3D-printed outfit on YouTube—shirt to glasses, belt to shoes. The materials cost looked modest at first, but the project demanded a $1,999 printer for the shorts and took 560 hours of printing, turning “DIY fash
For Matthew Trahan, the experiment started like a flex. A YouTuber known for 3D printing everything from musical instruments to bedroom furniture decided to go bigger—and stranger—than a prototype.
In his latest project. Trahan printed a full outfit: a shirt. shorts. shoes. socks. a belt. a hat. a wallet. a bag. a tie. and glasses. The pitch was simple—fashion week. but with plastic—yet the execution turned out to be a reminder that 3D printers can make shapes without automatically making them wearable.
Some pieces came out more convincing than others. The shorts. in particular. looked unmistakably like something built for a cartoon world. not a runway—close enough to a Minecraft character that viewers couldn’t miss the comparison. Still, there were genuinely interesting results, including the Waveform shoe design by Stephen Drunks.
Then came the part people usually want to know right away: what it actually cost.
The filament alone came to about $100, which sounds like a bargain—until the project’s hardware math starts adding up. Trahan needed a Prusa Core 1L printer specifically to print the shorts, and that machine costs $1,999. He also used several different machines across the outfit. turning the idea of “cheap DIY” into something closer to a full-blown build.
Hours are the other price tag, and Trahan paid those too. He spent 33 hours modeling all the different items, then 560 hours printing everything. Using a power cost estimator. the electricity for those 560 hours comes to about $13.30 at the US average rate of $0.16 per kilowatt-hour. An Energy Information Administration April 2026 figure puts the average slightly higher at $0.19 per kWh, and Californians pay nearly $0.38 per kWh.
Put together. the project lands on a total that doesn’t match the casual fantasy most viewers have when they hear “3D printed outfit.” It’s roughly $100 in materials. $1. 999 in equipment. 593 hours of time. and—depending on how you feel about the shorts—an end result that’s as much about engineering curiosity as it is about comfort.
All the patterns are still available on MakerWorld if someone wants to try the same build. But the story Trahan’s experiment leaves behind is harder to ignore: making an outfit from a printer isn’t just about whether the design exists—it’s about whether the technology. the cost. and the time add up to something you’ll actually want to wear.
3D printing DIY fashion Matthew Trahan Prusa Core 1L MakerWorld electricity cost wearable tech filament cost