Berlin collective The T-Shirt Issue has sliced up jersey fabric to create four faceted garments that capture stages of a sweatshirt melting into the ground (+ slideshow).

Hande Akcayli, Murat Kocyigit and Rozi Rexhepi of the The T-Shirt Issue deconstruct the everyday garment into new forms.

"Our approach is to take an incredibly common object like a T-shirt and break it into its smallest meaningful elements to build a new piece free from the strictures of the original," they said.

Their latest project, Melt, takes a long-sleeved sweatshirt and breaks it down in four stages until it becomes a flat puddle of jersey.

Starting with an easily recognisable faceted form, each subsequent piece is more crumpled and folded as if it has melted.

The sleeves merge with the body of the top and the hem splays outward until it becomes horizontally flat.

"With Melt we shape and deconstruct the ego in real life," said the designers. "Each polygon stands for a different facet of the persona, symbolising the process of development, connected through personal experience. With each step, the ego increasingly lets go of social structures and self-centredness. What remains is a melting pot of possibility."

To create the designs, high resolution 3D scans of a sweatshirt were reduced to just 360 polygons and the creases where the shapes met were exaggerated.

A 3D animation tool was used to morph the shape into three more forms, reducing the amount of polygons each time.

Jersey fabric was then laser cut using a card pattern and sewn together, stiffened with thick paper on the inside to keep the forms rigid.

Melt will be installed at Gallery R'Pure during New York Fashion Week, from 6 February at 7pm.

We featured more designs by The T-Shirt Issue created using human body scans to create sewing patterns in 2008 and included the project in our Dezeen Book of Ideas.