New Revolution for Garment Industry
The new revolution is under way in the garment business bringing an end to familiar working practices and throwing skilled artisans out of their jobs. Unlike the events that transformed England in the early 1800s, this new revolution is affecting the entire industrialised world in one go, and its progress can be measured in years rather than decades. This time the power behind the change is computers rather than steam, and the employees at risk are the designers and artists who create the fabrics that go into clothing, linens and upholstery.
Since 1992, the firm took its software, which can run on a personal computer, to the International Textile Machinery Association trade fair in Milan. ‘We were the only ones at the show with a computer loom . . . and every loom maker came by to look at it.’ The firm demonstrated how it used the computer to design patterns and to weave samples of these on the computer screen.
This approach is the essence of the revolution in garment design. Designers can now turn yarn into fabric and sketch a garment from the fabric without leaving their workstations. A design process that took weeks or months can now be over in less than 24 hours. The images on colour monitors and those reproduced by colour printers are so realistic that buyers from department stores, who once insisted on seeing and touching sample garments, are now willing to commit millions of pounds to a new range of clothes after looking at a design on a computer screen or seeing a print-out . Although only a minority of the world’s textile designers, garment manufacturers and garment makers have switched to computers so far, many more have begun to investigate the concept.
John Brown, a British garment manufacturer based in Manchester, describes how the firm used to create a new line of men’s shirts before it invested more than half a million pounds in computer technology. A fabric designer would sketch out a weave plan on graph paper, and choose colours from a chart provided by yarn makers. A skilled painter then painstakingly copied the design onto a piece of hardboard, trying to include every yarn and to match each colour precisely. For a quote on the fabric cost from Japan, which is the base of Tootal’s most distant supplier, the company sent the painted sample by courier to the mill. Only after receiving the quote did Tootal show the sample to buyers from John’s major department stores, which are based in London. If the buyers approved the design without any changes, which was a very unlikely event, Tootal told the mills in Japan to buy yarns and begin weaving.
Tootal now lets a computer do the hard work. Its designers select a weave pattern and the yarn colours, which are keyed to individual yarns in the mills’ inventories, and then they watch the fabric appear on their monitors. They can modify the design - make the stripe a bit broader, the blue a bit deeper, or change a pink background to a red one and insert checks between the stripes - before printing a paper copy of the fabric for senior directors to inspect the designs. After approval, the design is sent over the international telecommunications network to an identical computer and printer at the mills in Japan, using a modem at each end of the link. When the bid comes back, the design is distributed in the same way to Tootal’s London office, which serves the buyers with screenings or print-outs of the design. Before the sun sets over the Midlands, Tootal may be able to confirm an order for thousands of metres of fabric from Japan. And when it arrives, the fabric will look so much like the paper copy from the printer that few people can tell the difference between the two from more than a metre away.
According to John, computerisation of design means that Tootal can respond to the whims of fashion in weeks, rather than months. When a particular style does well, the firm can create dozens of similar designs and rush them into production while buyers are still interested.
Not all the companies that are investing in computer design are huge firms with hundreds of thousands of pounds to spend. Al and Pat Reid work with two other people, who are together known as the Harry Rubens Studio, out of an apartment in Manhattan’s Chelsea district. The quartet spent almost $30 000 on an AVL system that includes a personal computer, two colour monitors, a colour scanner and a colour printer.
The Reids create designs, which they print and sell. Garment designers and manufacturers come to them and ask for three bold stripes, four plaids and a floral print, all using the same palette of colours and all having a similar style, or ‘feel’. When customers bring samples of fabric that they like, Pat uses the scanner to transfer the pattern to the computer. The scanner flashes beams of red, green and blue light, in sequence, at the sample. It measures the intensity of colour a line at a time across the fabric and converts the measurements into digital signals. These are transferred to the computer, which later reconstitutes them as an image on its screen with a resolution of up to 300 dots per inch. Within 60 seconds, the fabric is on the screen, and the Reids go to work. They broaden a stripe, shrink a block of solid colour, change a brown background to green, and increase the frequency with which the plaid’s basic pattern is repeated. In two hours, Pat can produce a dozen designs; each one is ‘new’ and yet each one has the feel of the original sample. And according to copyright law in the US, customers who change a pattern by at least 20 per cent have created a new one, which they own - no matter who produced the original sample.
Textile designers work with two monitors, both connected to the same computer. The smaller, low-resolution monitor displays the options available for creating a new design; the large, high-resolution monitor displays the fabric as it is designed. Designers use a ‘mouse’ to indicate to the computer the data they want to transfer from one monitor to the other. (The mouse is a tabletop device that moves an arrow on the screen just as a keyboard moves a cursor.) The mouse is also the modern designer’s only instrument. Designers use it to draw a skirt, for instance, on screen and then click a button on the mouse to indicate to the computer that the skirt is ready to accept fabric. They click the button twice to move to the small monitor, where they run the arrow down the list of available designs and, with another click, select a red and yellow plaid or some other design that is stored in the computer. Two more clicks bring the arrow back to the large monitor and the sketch of the skirt, where another click ‘applies’ the red and yellow plaid to the skirt. In less than a second, the skirt can be displayed in any pattern of fabric stored in the computer.
Alternatively, a garment designer can sketch a model wearing a long, pleated skirt and a jacket over a blouse, then transfer the sketch to the computer using the scanner. Working with a mouse, the designer then outlines each piece or element of the design: the sleeves, the front, the collar of the jacket, the flat areas and each pleat or fold in the skirt. Then with a few clicks of the mouse, the designer can colour the jacket solid navy and weave a plaid skirt. In a few seconds, the computer simulates draping and shadowing to create a realistic image of the result. The image is not ‘flat’; stripes widen as they go over bulges to give the effect of three dimensions. Garment designers no longer have to imagine how a particular fabric would look in one of their creations; they can view their ideas on a computer screen and hand round a print-out.
Computer Design has created a series of programs that enable a designer to control every step of the design from the choice of yarn that is woven into a piece of cloth to the way a garment made from the fabric will look on a model. In the yarn design stage, a circle appears on the screen to represent the yarn seen end-on; designers select individual fibres, in any of the 16.7 million colours in the program’s palette, and add them to the yarn. They then choose how to spin the yarn and the tightness of the twist. When satisfied, they can view the yarn in three thicknesses, as it would look from above. If they want to have a soft, brushed surface, or nap - as with the fuzzy acrylic sweaters - they can blur the image on screen so that the yarn looks fuzzy. Then, with just a couple of keystrokes, or mouse-clicks, the designers choose a sample weave and fill the screen with fabric woven from the yarn.
The sections of the program that control the design of woven and printed fabric produced by Computer Design are very much like AVL’s, and let the designers experiment endlessly with colours, patterns and repeated elements. If designers like an element from a fabric design that is already in the computer, they can copy the element, a rosette in a floral print for instance, into their new design. Colours can be changed, made lighter or darker, and their density, or richness, varied from pastel to fully saturated.
The downside for designers is that garment manufacturers have become more demanding. Manufacturers often decide that a fabric design is not quite right and that a little tinkering with the pattern, a slight variation in the colours, might put things right. In the past, designers could say that they did not have time to make more changes; a design was either approved, reluctantly, or filed away. Now there is always time to create ten more designs if necessary.
The extra power of the Computer Design system makes the process faster: creating a design with AVL programs and equipment may require dozens of transitions, using the computer’s mouse, between the main and secondary monitors, and the final design may take up to 15 seconds to appear on the main monitor.
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