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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A look at the people who are truly making your clothes unique.

Fashion designers within the conventional fashion industry have become disengaged from fashion construction and makers are marginalized. Designers are the public face of the fashion industry, basking in its glamor and prestige, with makers often sitting at the opposite end of the hierarchy. The distance is philosophical, with the role of the fashion designer seen to involve applying creative vision to generate a sketch for the maker (or more, usually a team of makers) to manifest.

Julian Roberts, inventor of the “Subtraction Cutting” method in an Openwear interview talks of designing in patterns, “rather than in vague illustrative drawings which become reinterpreted by other skilled cutters.”

The distance between designer and maker of fashion at the design stage can also be physical, with the actual manufacturing process hidden from view in far-away sweat shops and not talked about or celebrated. Julian Roberts says “before you buy a garment and wear it, it will have been touched by many skillful hands, but often the hand that touches it the LEAST is the hand of the fashion designer.”

The physical and philosophical distance has enabled a range of issues to arise and be solidified over the last 150 years, or ever since Charles Worth the “Father” of fashion design, placed his label on a garment. These include concerns of exploitation, copying, speed vs. innovation and secrecy. How can a re-engagement of design and making foster meaningful, sustainable change in the fashion industry?

Shingo Sato

I consider myself to be a patternmaker-designer. To design zero waste garments you need to be able to design as you make the pattern and not just in response to a design. Design occurs in many places but it does not occur as a sketch of the exterior of the garment, but in the development of the pattern. What implications does designing in this manner have on the development of a sustainable fashion industry? For a start it can result in the unexpected. Much of the fashion we see is a copy of what’s been done before, either last week, last season or last century. For many, the design process involves directly or indirectly copying an existing design, so the patternmaker’s job has become to faithfully recreate the look within the companies size range and for the desired fabrication, perhaps with a few modifications.

The end result can be disheartening for consumers when they see a rapid dissemination of similar styles globally, a process that leads to its ever-faster fashion “death.” It is also a difficult thing for designers, as they know styles are repeated ad nauseam throughout history, then their consumers can (and do) buy vintage garments while remaining fashionable.

For most companies it does not make economic sense to invest time (and therefore money) into the development of a design if the likely outcome is not known. The speed of change driven by the monetary benefits of Economies of Scale and consumer are demanding, so while the argument for which comes first generally descends into a chicken and egg debate, the problem is a very real and immediate one for fashion companies. A problem they solve by repeating and copying existing styles. It should be no surprise that this is the foundation of the contemporary fashion system.

Comme des Garcons, AW 2012

Famous Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie MacIntosh, once said “There is hope in honest error. None in the icy perfections of the mere stylist.” Have fashion designers become mere stylists? With economic and time pressures at an all time high for fashion creatives, the space once available for truly innovative fashion is being squeezed out and much of what does happen occurs at the fringes of the industry. This is often in education, where both graduates and academics in many cases have more creative time and space without the financial restrictions demanded by the need to produce a commercial body of work up to six times per year (or more in the case of fast fashion).

Luckily every season there are examples of designers who push things in a different direction. Whether by material use, technique or form there are designers and their creative teams which pride themselves on demonstrating true innovation in at least parts of their collections. When Rei Kawakubo of Comme Des Garcons sent her models down the catwalk for AW 2012 devoid of a soundtrack with 2-Dimensional garments full of wry cliché it was a clear critique of the growing “flatness” of the industry.

Junya Watanabe

Rei Kawakubo is renowned for being an innovator in the true sense of the word in the fashion world, constantly pushing viewers and wearers with her own unique view of the dressed body – famously bulging and distorted, always 3D – so for her to present such a flat body of work speaks volumes of the state of the industry. As the representation of the fashion industry becomes more and more about ubiquitous and repetitive copies, fashion rebels like Rei Kawakubo and Junya Watanabe seek to find alternatives. For many, this alternative is evident in the rise of craftsmanship, in particular, a re-emergence of innovative patternmaking.

Pattern Magic, Tomoko Nakamichi

Patternmaking is seen by many to be an aloof, mathematical and often dry practice, certainly not design, and very inaccessible. However, when Patternmaking and Design meet as equals, magical things can happen. The brilliant and enigmatic book series from Laurence King Publishing called Pattern Magic, gives a taste for what kind of alchemy is possible. Written by Tomoko Nakamichi of the famous Bunka Fashion College in Japan – a college who taught fashion innovator Yohji Yamamoto –  this series of books introduces the reader to thinking about the design of garments in unashamedly 3D and unexpected ways. Originally printed only in Japanese the images show garment features merging from collar to body, form leaping off the body, while soft geometry and the body tussle with each other and mercifully, standardized forms became passé. The skilled patternmaker can become a kind of magician-designer, deceiving the wearer and viewer, distorting the dressed body, and giving us something refreshing.

From Pattern Magic

Patternmaker, designer and educator Shingo Sato gives away many of his techniques and make his “tools of the trade” readily available on youtube. While his approach, which he calls “Transformation, Reconstruction” has been critiqued as simply dart manipulation and elimination, something which is neither new or innovative, he demystifies the process, merging design with patternmaking to “draw” line and form on the dress form, often with a magic marker. An exploration of his techniques reveals an ease with breaking tradition and the adoption of new form, the old rules need not apply.

Julian Roberts, Subtraction Cutting

Julian Roberts is a UK based designer and inventor of what is called Subtraction Cutting. This process involves designing not the exterior, not the front, back or side, indeed there are usually no side seams to his garments (after all, do humans have side seams?). Instead, Roberts designs the interior space of the garment that the body travels through. His approach results in forms that are difficult to predict, requiring an intimate relationship between designer, hand, cloth and body. While acting as “Fashion Adviser for Europe, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa” for the British Council, he also spends much of his time teaching workshops full of students how to take the creation of clothing in new directions by engaging their maker-mind in the design process.

Julian Roberts, Live Subtraction Cutting, Liverpool

Both Shingo and Julian freely share their processes, rebelling not only against aesthetic norms but also against the tradition of secrecy in the fashion industry. The growing call for openness and transparency strikes fear into the hearts of many designers and the wider implications still need working out. However, sharing design processes which cannot lead to mindless copying (from designer to designer to highstreet to trash), helps to slow the fashion juggernaught down, provides consumers with real choice and not just the illusion of choice, while reconnecting designers and consumers with makers and producers, will lead to an industry which does all things better.

And for that we should all rejoice.

Image: Style.com, Laurence King Publishers

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Yield’s “Making Fashion Without Waste” exhibit, a closer look at an art and a movement.

In the midst of Fashion Week here in New York, it might seem contradictory to go to a show on producing less waste when all around, fashion is flying. In eco-fashion, however, it’s always good to keep things in balance and to have a reality-grounded perspective about the fashion industry. However beautiful, however sustainable, designers have got to keep themselves in check when it comes to the waste they produce with every collection.

Some designers are better at this than others.

The Textile Arts Center launched Yield: Making Fashion Without Waste, on Friday night at their Brooklyn location, featuring zero waste designers Holly McQuillan, Caroline Priebe, Timo Rissanen, Julian Roberts, Tara St. James, David Telfer, Yeohlee Teng, Jennifer Whitty, Natalie Chanin, Carla Fernandez, Sam Formo, and Julia Lumsden.

Holly McQuillan, Yield Curator, designer and lecturer in the fashion design program at Massey University’s College of Creative Arts in Wellington, New Zealand was available to answer some questions pre-show about the exhibit and just how zero waste can be that when by the simple act of design and creation, there is excess.

Here’s what she had to say.

Yield curator and designer, Holly McQuillan

Would you consider zero waste design an art?
No, it’s a technique. Painting is a technique and can be an art form or a way to decorate your home. It depends on what you do with it, like any technique, its up to the practitioner. So some zero waste design could be considered art, but much of it is commercial design.

Julian Roberts and Holy McQuillan

Why don’t more designers use it if it helps maximize fabric use and create less waste?
Primarily for 2 reasons.
A: When you first start it is difficult to do well. Like any new skill that requires a bit of effort, zero waste can begin badly, many students try it once, it doesn’t meet their expectations and they assume its not possible. The reality is that it’s a technique, like standard pattern cutting and draping on a dress form and sewing, learning it takes time.

B: Because of this, the assumption is that you have no control over the aesthetic – something all designers want. The more you practice zero waste fashion the more you can shape the outcomes. Many good designers have spent 3-4 years being taught the skills of traditional fashion design (sketching, design development, drape, pattern cutting, construction) and then go into industry and continue to have at least some of these skills developed. This enables designers/pattern cutters to have control over the outcomes; a layman has a great deal more difficulty resolving a garment design because they don’t have the skill base.

Julian Roberts

Designers want to be able to immediately be as good at zero waste design as they already are at the traditional models, but of course most won’t be as they haven’t had years of learning in education or industry. So they assume the outcomes they initially see from their attempts are all they will be able to achieve. They also assume that the outcomes they see out there by existing zero waste designers are all that can be achieved, but every designer approaches it differently and therefore has different outcomes.

Recently I’ve been in conversation with one of the worlds best known producers of clothing about implementing a zero waste fashion collection to their ranges. If these guys can do it, anyone can.

Timo Rissanen

Can you talk about “cultural memory” inherent in our clothing and how that ties into zero waste?
I stumbled into zero waste while completing my Masters of Design at Massey University in 2004/2005. My masters (called First Son) wasn’t on zero waste fashion at all – it was exploring the role clothing can play in communicating cultural and collective memory. How clothing can tell a story and the appropriateness of garments as a medium for that. I was interested in the flexibility inherent in cloth, the intimacy of wearing clothing next to the skin, its ability to tell people about who or what you are, the multi-layered, adaptable possibilities of cloth and garments, and importantly the way garments, more than most other personal items, seem to be able to ‘hold’ the memory of the person who wore them.

Sam Formo

All of this combined into a collection of five garments that told a story collected from a group of people about a person important in my life – my father. He was an ordinary husband, father, farmer and friend who grew up in post WWII New Zealand and died in 1993 after a battle with cancer. I was using his life and the memories people had of him as representative of (masculine) culture in post war New Zealand and testing how clothing could be used to transcend time, to communicate narratives and loss to contemporary New Zealanders.

To achieve this I used a process of cutting 2D cloth (landscape) without cutting any part off, and transforming the cloth into five different garment designs that told a different story about my father and the time he lived in. The garments are not fixed, they can be ‘unmade’ and ‘made’ again and again using the relatively complex fastenings, folds and twists, so to be able to make them the way I intended them you need to know the story behind them. However, someone else could make a completely different garment with a different interpretation of a similar ‘story.’’ The garments were zero waste because nothing in memory or time is cut off and removed, nothing is ‘wasted,’ it all comes together to make us who we are, what our cultures are, both good and bad, whether we like it or not.

I didn’t know what zero waste fashion was, my manifestation of what we now call Zero Waste Fashion came about from my research into memory and a chance encounter with a pattern for a Kimono (which are usually zero waste). There were no sustainable goals in my master project, just a respect for craft, time, landscape and a desire to communicate an idea.

Yeohlee Teng

Do all the designers featured design with zero waste in mind all the time or was this just a challenge for some for Yield?
Not all the designers are always zero waste designers. All but Julian Roberts had garments that were zero waste in some way, which is why they were selected back in early 2010. Julian Roberts uses a technique he invented called Subtraction Cutting which lends itself well to zero waste fashion, and has been inspirational to Timo and myself in the work we do. So we challenged Julian to attempt a zero waste piece for this exhibition, it is not quite zero waste, but a vast improvement on his usual yield.

David Telfer explores a range of innovative approaches, one of which is zero waste design. Yeohlee Teng and Zandra Rhodes do not always design with zero waste in mind, but are always extremely mindful of how they use cloth. The garments in YIELD are demonstrations of what is possible. Today we could add many more examples, as more and more designers attempt this process, but that’s a whole other project.

Carla Fernandez

How does a fashion designer one day decide to call what they are creating “zero waste” when by the very act of designing they are creating waste?

I’m not even sure where the term came from! It should probably be called Zero Waste Garment Design or Zero Waste Pattern Design. We intentionally didn’t call our exhibition Zero Waste Fashion because not all the designers are zero waste fashion designers, so instead it’s YIELD: Making Fashion Without Making Waste. So when we make the garments in the show we don’t make any (or much) waste. It’s the easiest way to explain what the premise for the show is, and for what we do in general, so it seems to stick.

Principals of waste management ask that you first don’t produce any waste, then you reduce waste, then you reuse it and then you recycle it. So this process targets the first step in waste management, we don’t produce waste in production. Now a company/designer/consumer can choose to follow through with other equally important steps to reduce their environmental impact, or not. Obviously I’d prefer they used organic, recycled or otherwise sustainable fabrics. That they designed timeless garments that encouraged their consumers to buy less and local, That they transported their locally made garments in biodegradable packaging using transportation methods with minimized impacts on the environment.

Natalie Chanin

I’d like it if they encouraged their consumers to wash less, in cold water, and to not use the dryer. I would encourage designers and consumers to support mending services and local craft. And, when the garment can no longer be mended, for it to be reused in another capacity until its eventual disposal – ideally being recycled or composted. Zero Waste Fashion is one step in a possible series of steps. Zero waste fashion can also be about using the scraps for other purposes – such as what Natalie Chanin does, or designers could use textiles that can be recycled into new fabrics. Sustainable designers need to deal somehow with the resources they waste in the production of their garments. There are so many opportunities for designers, consumers and retailers to make a difference, zero waste fashion is one such opportunity.

Tara St James

There a number of important repercussions from designing in this way also:

Designing a zero waste garment is slower: It would be extremely difficult have a lead-time (from design to delivery) of 14 days (such as Zara has) for all but the most simple zero waste fashion design. While the waste reduction from this process would benefit from the vast scale of fast fashion – the more zero waste garments you make the greater the reduction of waste – the negative impacts of fast fashions speed of change would cancel this out. It’s quite the conundrum and something I struggle with a lot. I guess it depends if you believe its possible for designers to stop people from consuming/disposing of clothing the way they currently do.

It requires all members of a design team to consider every decision they make. The production of clothing has long separated out the roles of design and production. To successfully achieve a zero waste garment either the line needs to be developed by a person with strength in pattern cutting, 3D design and construction, or the team needs to work as one in a truly collaborative way. The pattern for a zero waste garment is the 3D design, the pattern and the marker all in one – the design is not a sketch.

You can’t copy an existing design easily: following fads can be difficult. The value in a zero waste design is its originality, its craft and its embedded energy. Garments designed through a zero waste design process will have moments that are unexpected, they wont look exactly like everything else you see in stores because it is difficult to draw a design or to look at an existing garment and say “I want to design something like that.”

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