Walk into MakerBot Industries and you’ll find you’ve left a nondescript block near downtown Brooklyn and stepped into the anything-goes pages of a Dr. Seuss book.

Rows of 3-D printers housed in wooden crates with painted-on names like The Replicator and Thing-O-Matic are humming along, fed by spools of plastic, creating objects layer by layer, such as an Empire State building in miniature.

MakerBot cofounder and chief executive officer Bre Pettis, the proverbial Cat in the Hat, arrives to discuss the company’s latest collaboration: funky oversize sunglasses that the company printed out for fashion designer Asher Levine’s Fall Winter 2012 Collection of menswear during New York Fashion Week. But first, Pettis will show off a few 3-D printer creations: a green and yellow globe, some disembodied plastic hands making the OK sign, and a molecular structure—all made with desktop 3-D printers that consumers can buy to design and produce plastic items they came up with using computer-assisted design software.

“It’s an exciting time because we’re making machines and we’re working with people who want to be creative. There’s now 10,000 MakerBots out in the universe,” says Pettis. “The people who are on the bleeding edge show up on our doorstep.”

Among those inventive types is MakerBot's latest “artist in residence,” Levine. At 23, he's already created custom pieces for Lady Gaga’s “Marry the Night” music video and has outfitted the Black Eyed Peas, Bruno Mars, Scissor Sisters, and Sam Sparro. Levine's label just appeared in Vogue Italia, and he was—not surprisingly—swarmed by well-wishers Friday night during his Fashion Week presentation at a room in a historic downtown library transformed into a club-like scene (see slideshow of Levine's show and more from MakerBot here).

His models wore flat-front trousers and tailored jackets with Doc Marten boots and wild accessories, from the oversize MakerBot sunglasses (very Kanye West) to Edward Scissorhands-like gloves to a helmet that lit up. Illuminated MakerBot printers produced still more sunglasses while a DJ kept the music going.

“We were just thinking of all the different things we could do,” says Levine, who says he plans to create more accessories with MakerBot technology and sees 3-D technology as playing a big role in fashion’s future. “Why couldn’t I get my iPhone out, snap a picture of you, and make customized clothes that would fit you perfectly? Look, we’re going to get out of this economy by [using technology like this] and working our asses off.”

Creating clothing using 3-D technology may be a little ways off, according to Pettis, but whatever player in the 3-D printer market (which includes industrial-level printer producers and consumer companies like MakerBot) figures out how to do it stands to make a fortune.