Force Manipulation Across a Textile Metamaterial

The design of functional apparel currently requires a human intuition-based design approach to manipulate forces around the body. This design process often requires tedious trial and error, by combining regions of stretchable and inextensible material for comfort and to react tensile loads. However, this process typically leads to form fitting textiles that are difficult to don and doff. To solve this problem, we develop strategies to identify periodic textile metamaterials capable of manipulating internal forces directly. Using this inverse design tool, we can generate unique textile structures that are tight fitting to the body but relax during donning/doffing. Furthermore, we show that this framework can be applied to manipulate internal forces in a variety of ways, allowing us to realize and design a new generation of functional apparel textiles.