Are we witnessing the beginning of the end of the cut and sew garment production industry?

The majority of today’s fashion is produced using techniques that remain largely unchanged for the past 150 years. It is labor intensive; with many hands touching and working to produce the garments we wear everyday. The industry that manufactures our clothing is one of the least automated industries, and has by and large failed to ever fully embrace mass production techniques.

Mass manufacturing processes such as rotational molding revolutionized the production of furniture and other objects for industrial design, while robotics have transformed vehicle production. Automated processes and technologies are routinely used in almost all other industries, but human hands largely still make the bulk of what we wear.

The processes that come together to produce a fashion garment are broken into tiny actions, each operated by a different highly efficient and well-practiced individual. For example there will be one person who rivets your jeans, another who top stitches the pockets and yet another who only trims threads. One of the few aspects of garment production that has been automated is cutting. CNC blades or laser cutters rapidly cut multiple layers of cloth at the same time. However, this only occurs in large-scale production, as most small and medium scale manufacturers still cut by hand. By the time your garment reaches you it has passed through many hands, each person paid a fraction of the cost to produce the whole.

There are many contradictions apparent in this high labor industry.

The Good: it keeps a lot of people employed, in fact more people are employed by the textile and apparel industry than any other.

The Bad: they are generally paid a low wage and often work in poor working conditions in a repetitive (trimming threads for the rest of your life anyone?) and sometimes dangerous job. Transitioning into a more automated industry had profound impacts on the motor vehicle manufacturing industry, reducing the cost of cars and increasing production, while leaving thousands unemployed and the communities who relied on the industry decimated. If garment production were to follow the automated route the impacts are difficult to gauge, though unemployment would likely be one of them. The question of whether the payoffs are worth it is part of an ongoing debate, but what would an automated fashion production industry even look like? What might it mean for consumers and designers?

Many of the advances in industrial design technology focus around the transition from subtractive production processes, where you start with a sheet or block of material and remove what you don’t need to make the finished object, to additive processes, where you start with nothing and you only add what you need. Additive technologies are faster and less labor intensive when automated and produce substantially less waste to produce the same or better end result. It enables form and structures never before possible with reductive processes.

Julian Roberts, Subtraction Cutting

Some of the most interesting developments in regards to garment design and production are occurring at the threshold between industrial design, science and fashion. Revolutionary thinkers at these intersections have produced spray on fabric, 3D printed swimwear and couture, Liquid Molded garments, and DPOL. These emerging (and still developing) technologies add to more mainstream techniques such as whole garment knitting, digital printing, embroidery and laser cutting, to present us with a future for the fashion industry which is vastly different to the one we have now.

Conflating the textile production and garment production processes through technological advances such as 3D printing, as well as producing garment forms otherwise impossible, also significantly reduces waste and carbon emissions. The highly globalized nature of the fashion industry leads to the raw materials of textiles grown in one country, processed in another and cut and sewn in yet another, all while being sold all over the world.

Imagining in contrast, a future where we have a 3D printer on our desktop at home is not that far off, so picture this: You are about to go out on a Friday evening and realize you “have nothing to wear!” You pay $50 to download from the internet that latest Fall 2018 dress design you love, software modifies it to fit exactly and then sends it to your desktop 3D printer, 30 minutes later you’re out the door.

This will happen.

Image: Kheel Center, Cornell, The Denim Wiki

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Over the past few years we have witnessed the exponential growth of sustainable fabrics. And we are all aware that this is a movement and not a trend. Organic cotton, hemp, tencel, recycled polyester and organic wool are gaining popularity, evidenced on the international runways and in fashion media. By now most of us are familiar with the advantages of sustainable fabrics that includes fewer toxic chemicals, reducing the amount of textiles dumped into our landfills, and producing in a closed loop environment.

But consumers are still largely dependent on non-sustainable fabrics like Polyester, Lycra, Spandex and Gortex to name a few. These fabrics hold properties that we have grown to view as necessities, like stretch, durability and price. So how do we discover a sustainable alternative?

CRAiLAR® Organic Fibers is touted to be the foundation of the first truly sustainable yarn in the apparel industry, and poised to become the revolutionary next step in sustainable fibers.

CRAiLAR is developed by Naturally Advanced Technologies (NAT), in collaboration with the National Research Council of Canada. It is an ingredient, much like Lycra or Gortex, except that it is completely sustainable. NAT’s hope is that apparel companies who currently use common blends like cotton/lycra, will shift to using a cotton/CRAiLAR blend. If blended with other sustainable fabrics, this new technology could have a significant impact on the apparel and textiles market as a whole.

The fibers are made from hemp stalk, which is not commonly used in apparel because of its rough texture and stiffness. The all-natural CRAiLAR process transforms the rough hemp stalk into a velvety-soft, yet strong and durable, textile fiber. The enzymes used in the process are all natural and GMO free, and the result is a fabric that is soft and supple like cotton, and has the same performance traits, so it is cool and comfortable to wear year-round. NAT claims that it is even better than cotton because it reduces shrinkage and has more tensile strength than cotton. It looks like cotton, dyes like cotton, fits the same and washes the same.

Hemp is known to be one of the most sustainable, renewable, and environmentally friendly crops that requires no irrigation, chemical fertilizers and pesticides. It can grow to 14-feet in just a few months, producing multiple yields within one year. While many plants deplete the surrounding soil of vital nutrients, hemp is beneficial to soil, and actually improves its condition. Industrial hemp absorbs carbon dioxide – the most prominent greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere – at five times the rate of the same acreage of forest.

The problem that hemp faces is that it cannot be grown in certain countries, including the United States where it is illegal. While more hemp is exported to the U.S than to any other country, the United States Government does not consistently distinguish between marijuana and the non-psychoactive Cannabis used for industrial and commercial purposes.  Some states have defied Federal law and made the cultivation of industrial hemp legal. These states – North Dakota, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Montana, West Virginia, and Vermont – have not yet begun to grow hemp because of resistance from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration.

CRAiLAR Organic Fibers are sourced mainly from Canada as well as a few other countries in Europe where its growth is not illegal.

CRAiLAR is currently undergoing approval for third party GOTS certification, however NAT does claim that the entire life cycle can be certified organic, making it eco-friendly from beginning to end.

It is too early to know what the cost implications of CRAiLAR are at this stage, but recent trials sponsored by Hanesbrands Inc. reveal that blending it with cotton significantly reduces manufacturing costs by reducing shrinkage and improving dye uptake. The resulting savings could bring the final cost closer to that of regular cotton, as opposed to the premium paid for organic cotton (which in some cases is as much as 60 percent higher).

NAT’s intent is to make CRAiLAR Organic Fibers a household brand name. They’ve already teamed up with Patrick Yarns, a world leader in the manufacturing of high-performance industrial yarns, who has successfully blended CRAiLAR with a number of natural and synthetic fibers.

I am impressed with this new technology, and I love the fact that it is derived from hemp. However, it really comes down to what CRAiLAR is blended with because that will determine the overall sustainability of the garment. If it is blended with conventional fabrics, then it really is only a slight improvement. And then there is that argument that any change is good change. However, if blended with organic cotton, tencel and other sustainable or certified organic fabrics, then the final product definitely meets my standards and gets a full thumbs up.

Images: CRAiLAR Organic Fibers

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