Search results

Recently, the Polish National Fiber Research Laboratory provided linen samples. In addition to these Polish fabric samples, we also collected linen fabric samples which were made in Japan and throughout Europe. We have investigated hand properties of various linen fabrics, and identification of the Polish linen fabrics quality from those of other linen fabrics. The fabric hand of Polish linen fabrics is unique, it possesses a hand just between wool‐like and cotton‐like fabrics. We have clarified that the Polish linen fabrics are suitable for hari‐type and tailored type silhouette designs for women’s wear, and the fabrics are well‐suited for finishing garment appearance.

Japanese traditional Chirimen fabrics are used for making kimonos, which have a fixed structure and are worn in very particular ways. These fabrics have also been used as dress fabrics in recent years. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the characteristics of the mechanical properties of various types of Chirimen to clarify differences in their hand value (HV) and clothing appearance.

Chirimen fabrics were collected from the largest producing area, the Tango district, plus silk Chirimen and 40 polyester Chirimen samples, resulting in a total of 311 samples. The mechanical properties, HVs, and formability of Chirimen fabrics used for kimono fabrics were compared to those of Western fabrics, and their unique features were clarified.

Values of the weft direction of bending properties of all Chirimen groups, men and women's suit fabrics, and dress shirt fabrics were at the same level. A significant feature of the mechanical parameters of each Chirimen group (excluding logSP which are compound values of bending properties and shearing properties) was that they were in the range for ideal men's suiting zone. HV KOSHI of Chirimen is found to be closely related to the bending properties, thickness and weight of the fabric, and HV TEKASA of Chirimen is found to be closely related to the thickness and weight of the fabric.

This paper clarifies Chirimen's mechanical properties which contribute to traditional subjective evaluation by fabric experts.

For several years the clothing industry in France has been experiencing real problems. On the one hand, consumption has been stagnant, or indeed falling, and on the other, foreign competition has been growing at the same time as multifibre agreements are being dismantled. Result: between 1984 and 1994, the sector has lost 40 per cent of its workforce in France and a recent report by the European Commission predicts further losses which may well reach 30 per cent of the present workforce between now and the year 2008. The objective of this work is therefore to provide a brief survey of the present state of the industry, consumption, retail distribution and French foreign trade in order to set out its principal characteristics.

Manufacturing sector plays a vital role in the economy of developing countries like India. The Indian textiles and clothing industry has an overwhelming presence in the economic life of the country. The readymade garment segment contributes 42 per cent of the Indian textiles exports, which include cotton garments and accessories, manmade fiber garments and other textiles clothing. The overall export basket of India has increased from 13.6 per cent in 2014-15 to 15 per cent in 2015-16 for textiles and apparel products including handicrafts. Though clothing exports from India have witnessed high growth rates in the past decade as compared to other commodity exports, India’s performance, when compared to many competing countries, has not been much encouraging. India has lagged behind in clothing exports as compared to China, Bangladesh and Vietnam. This study mainly focused on analyzing the changing clothing export structure of select countries such as India, China, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Turkey by using revealed comparative advantage indices.

This study uses different variants of revealed comparative advantage indices, namely, Balassa’s RCA Index (Balassa, 1965), Dynamic RCA index (Kreinin and Plummer, 1994) and Revealed Symmetrical Comparative Advantage Index (Laursen, 1998). Indices were calculated for the period 2003 and 2013 under knitted category (HS 61) and not knitted category (HS 62) up to four-digit classification. Spearman rank correlation was applied for analyzing changes during the period under study. For calculation of RCA and dynamic RCA indices, the export data have been taken from UN Comtrade, an electronic database of United Nation and International Trade Statistics database of World Trade Organization.

The results highlighted that India ranks at the bottom in seven HS 61 clothing products and fourth in five HS 61 products. Bangladesh stands at the top in 11 of the HS 61 clothing products among selected countries. Similarly, Vietnam has also gained stronghold position in the global clothing trade. In many of these products, Bangladesh has higher revealed comparative advantage as compared to other countries. In HS 62 product category, India was at the bottom in eight products, whereas Bangladesh has gained the most in nine products on the comparative advantage basis. The findings highlighted the shift taking place in global clothing trade structure as trade was shifting toward low-cost countries such as Vietnam and Bangladesh. Surprisingly, India has foregone strategic advantage in many value-added products to low-cost countries such as Bangladesh and Vietnam.

This is one of the few studies undertaken to analyze comparative advantages of leading clothing exporter countries (mainly from Asian region) in the recent times. Findings depict changing export structure and dynamics of clothing exports in the region. Findings would help government, industry associations and policymakers in enhancing sector competitiveness and in identifying the growth products.

The continuing development of the textile and clothing manufacturing industries depends in no small measure on the successful implementation of reliable objective methods for the specification, prediction and control of fabric quality and performance attributes. In the last decade, we have seen several notable examples of fabric design and development, and production and quality control in textile processing and clothing manufacture in terms of fabric objective measurement technology. The quality and performance characteristics of fabrics are related to their low stress mechanical, surface and dimensional properties. The experimental errors involved in the measurement of these properties are known to be much smaller than the errors involved in subjective assessment of fabric quality attributes, especially those made by individual judges. We may define the concept of fabric objective measurement as a necessary and sufficient set of instrumentally measurable parameters which are required to specify the fabric quality, tailorability and clothing performance. In this way, fabric objective measurement technology provides a “fingerprint” of the fabric quality, tailorability and performance implying that any two fabrics will generally differ at least to some extent in their objectively measurable characteristics. Fabric objective measurement technology therefore provides the key for scientific and engineering principles to be used for fabric specification and design as well as process control. The most important consequence of the introduction of fabric objective measurement technology will be the promotion of technological communication between various sectors of the textile and clothing industry, research and development workers and all other sectors of industry (e.g. fibre producers, retailing, merchandising, machinery manufacturers) concerned with fibres, textiles and clothing.

A decision support model is presented and discussed which aims at identifying realistic export opportunities for a given exporting country. The model consists of a screening process of four consecutive filters, through which relevant information on markets (such as country risk indicators, macroeconomic data, imports per product group, etc.) is fed, and which allows the identification and deletion of less interesting market opportunities. Results are reported of the application of this decision support model to the case of Thailand, adapted for an analysis of foreign trade data at the SITC four‐digit level up to 1997. These results are compared with previous results obtained using the same model. In this way, Thailand's export opportunities in individual countries, and in the Asia‐Pacific region in particular, are listed and categorised according to criteria such as import market characteristics and Thailand's market share in the various markets.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on how to automatically generate the individualized patterns for women’s suits based on the 3D body point-cloud images.

With the software Imageware, the point-cloud data of the female body were measured according to the female body feature to obtain the heights, widths, depths and girths at various landmarks. Then the relationship between the height of each landmark and the body height was analyzed to build the height calculation rules by software SPSS, and the prediction models of body girths were established from the body widths and depths using regression analysis for pattern generation.

The pattern generation rules were built with the relationships between a human body and the garment patterns using the graphic flattening method. Based on the above rules, the final patterns were drafted automatically by using these dimensions to fit the subjects. The try-on experiment also showed that the individualized suits could fit the subjects’ body well at some feature landmarks.

In order to realize tailor-made and meet the consumers’ demands for individualized clothes, the development of garment CAD system has become inevitable in the garment industry. This paper could provide the foundation for automatic pattern generation, and technical support for tailor-made.

The goal of this study was to realize pattern alterations for women’s suits by using the spatial distribution of distance ease in the body-garment interface.

An unclothed mannequin and the mannequin clothed with seven suits having different ease allowances were scanned by a 3D body scanner respectively. The image of the unclothed mannequin was then superimposed on that of each clothed mannequin (suit) to exhibit the differences in ease distribution among these suits. The distance eases at ten selected body landmarks were determined by measuring the gaps between the body and suit surfaces.

The mathematical models of ease distributions were built through the regression analysis to predict the distance ease with a given ease allowance. After the verification with the actual measurements, these ease distribution models could provide localized distance eases for alternating pattern pieces to ensure a specified ease allowance.

In order to realize the automatic generation of garment patterns, the ease distribution between a human body and a garment is crucial because ease is one of the determinants for garment fit. This study demonstrated a new approach of automatic pattern alteration based on 3D scanned data to accelerate the pattern making process for women’s suits with customized ease allowance.

The US apparel industry continues to be a large, mature industry that is intensely competitive. It is also highly fragmented and is undergoing restructuring and operational changes that further accentuate past trends. The principal drivers of change continue to be the increasing levels of low‐cost imports, but also include dramatic changes in retailing following consolidation of the retail sector, new technology, changing work habits and demographic changes (principally the ageing of the baby boomers). In addition, trade and tax legislation that confers special status on firms operating in certain Caribbean countries has resulted in the growth of outward processing that in turn has led to further domestic firm operational restructuring.

The purpose of this paper is to improve the efficiency of pattern-making for suit lapels in the apparel industry, to master the perceptual knowledge of suit lapels and to establish a mapping relationship between suit lapel styles and perceptual judgment.

In this paper, notch lapel, peak lapel and shawl lapel are studied, and the authors extract the structural features in the order of drafting as the input values for model training. At the same time, after the expert screening, four perceptual evaluation dimensions based on a priori knowledge are selected as output values, which are finally classified using a decision tree algorithm.

The results show that different design parameters produce different perceptions of people's vision and, thus, different perceptual judgments. The decision tree model can effectively classify the perceptual judgment of the lapel shape.

The findings of this study help garment factories to provide optimal judgment of basic parameters before the production of a suit lapel and to improve the efficiency of the design.