Textile Engineering & Fashion Technology

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Received: January 01, 1970 | Published: ,

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Introduction

Textiles, mainly clothing is being contributed for social living of humans in various forms. From the prehistoric times till date, the different soft materials that could be transformed into second skin wearable fabrics have added values to human lives. The preparation and manufacturing process of fabric turned from simple to complicated yet applicable with a strong involvement of technology.¹ The resulted evolution has witnessed progressive creative concepts in three main areas, from basic fabric construction to fabric surface design and finally the finished product. The understanding of each of these important areas has developed focus on specialized sectors with the help of digital technological support that transformed the traditional practices into modern state of the art solutions.

The conventional fabric surface designing process had a tedious phase of manual art work, which consumed both time and energy of the artists and designers. For creating an attractive and profitable surface design fabric for both home textile industry and fashion apparel industry after gathering references and creating patterns demanded extreme precise drawings and coloring process. This practice was carried out in the most of the design houses related to fabric surface design products. The digital technology based revolution changed the canvas of work for many industries including textiles.² Among many gifts of digital technologies, the digital camera scanners and computers along-with compatible range of software facilitated the designers in their studios and in the field. The task of manual hunting for subject matters that could be illustrated into delightful surface patterns for the consumers became easier and more appealing.

The fashion design industry is a fast paced profession which exposes its consumers to a variety of creatively designed fashion apparel during a very short timeline as compared to past. The designers continuously worked on bringing the new ideas that they could effectively translate into an attractive fabric for fashion designer to work on. The digital imagery, 3D-body scanners and use of technical textiles has not only revolutionized the way the fabric is visualized by the fashion designers but also has provided a much easier way to design patterns for surface designers. They can now manipulate the actual images into a complete series of designs for fashion designers portfolio of dresses.³

The digital images have made their way onto the fabric surface design in both abstraction and reality based surface patterns. Acceptance of new ideas and manufacturing techniques has always been appreciated by the consumer market. The practical concepts like digital printing technology, user targeted technical textile took the contemporary fashion design industry to a whole new level as it provided them with less production and more innovation in fashion fabric structures. Above all, the use of digital technology constructed fabric and surface pattern design can now bring all variations and custom design solutions into reality.

It is always interesting to observe the impact of technology on the popular consumer markets. The digital dynamics is driving the current mindset of the designers and the consumers benefiting both with imaginative and creative solutions. Keen observing authorities of digital technology creation and innovation are continuously looking to incorporate and integrate modern material and technologies to manufacture product ranges. The fashion designers are effectively using 3d body scanning devices to custom design solutions for high end luxury consumer markets. Every imaginable process from start to finish is greatly affected by the positive exposure to digital dynamics related to the fashion industry as a whole and in segments of workflow pipeline. Modern consumer market is yet to see an unexpected involvement of a new face of digital technology hitting the fashion design industry and fashion designers perspective of thinking.⁴