WEAR Sustain - Smart Fashion Production - By Karin Vlug & Bas Froon

SMART FASHION PRODUCTION project is an EU-funded project, supported by WEARsustain.eu

Smart textiles have developed over the last couple of years. But the manufacturing into garments is still done in an old fashioned way, mainly based on sewing techniques. It is done at the other side of the globe. With ethical and environmental concerns. We don’t understand how we can we can call ‘smart fashion’ ‘smart’, if the production isn’t.

The work of Karin Vlug is on the cutting edge of high fashion and technology. Her goal is to create a smart garment manufacturing system without sewing. She won the Frans Molenaar Couture Award for one of her collections. Technologist Bas Froon translates creative ideas of designers into reality and developed the micromoulding machine in 2017. He uses soft bio-composite materials to digitally produce wearable soft products. Assembly of the pieces are done by CAM technology and his fusing technique instead of sewing.

In this project we propose to further develop our ‘smart fashion production’ concept together with a new design language. Smart textiles will play an important role because they operate at the cutting edge of the market. Our approach will enable to produce these smart textiles digitally into made-to-measure smart fashion.

In our approach, fashion design and development of the manufacturing technology will be highly integrated, iterative and hands-on. We identified three major ‘design variables’ that will help bringing the technology from a ‘proof of concept’ into a ‘system prototype demonstration’:

Within 1) manufacturing technique we are going to extend the micromoulding machine thus it can automatically join separate pattern parts to digitally create smart garments. This concept has been demonstrated in 2017, but some manual actions were still necessary. In our project we aim to further automate these manual actions. 2) Material research will be done to collect and construct new fabrics that are sustainable, fashionable and suitable for our process. This includes e-textiles.
Consumer desire depends on how it looks. Our technology and material, requires a totally new 3) design language and pattern handling. We will design cutting edge couture to stimulate market-pull.

Consumers will appreciate fashion that is made locally, more sustainable and under ethical conditions. In the future, garments will be tailor-made, more comfortable and valuable, while the digital manufacturing approach will make it economically feasible to produce local for a competitive price.