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Long before your favorite, 100% cotton t-shirt hugs your body and inspires confidence, it begins as a puzzle of two-dimensional polygons.
These flat, polygonal shapes or “pattern pieces” become a three-dimensional t-shirt through a multi-step process.
The pieces are drawn by hand or in a computer software program, then printed on giant rolls of paper and traced onto the fabric. Next, the shapes are cut out of the fabric and stitched together by a sewing machine operator.
Your favorite cotton t-shirt literally takes shape. But this is only the first sample. The fit still needs to be tested and adjusted, and human models need to be tested in different sizes and colors.
Today, all that is changing. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, dramatic advances in digital technology are taking many of these steps out of the real world and into the digital.
Internet connections and computer screens have become a lifeline for people and industries as workers around the world are sent home for months at a time. They headed for the system in a fashion shock.
3D digital clothing design is quickly becoming the new norm in clothing companies. That shift can already be seen in both the Stephenson College and MU fashion programs.
“For too long we’ve been doing things slowly and inefficiently, but now we have to catch up,” says Raquel Harmon, a Nike technical designer and fashion industry veteran.
Harmon
Another Stephens College fashion graduate and industry veteran, Camille Palmer, worked at PVH Corp. when the outbreak began. The company, which at the time owned Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, represented the exception, not the rule.
“The department that I was at PVH was really incredibly established and established for the epidemic because we had already gone through 3D-enabled design,” Palmer said.
Harmon said the outbreak will be a game-changer for the industry. During the Covid-19 lockdowns, she reminded overseas factories, “You have to wait four or five weeks for your next sample because everyone is home and we only have two people working in the sample line.
When physical samples arrived in America, Harmon and other Nike designers used couriers to transport them between their homes.
Now her team, and a growing number of teams at Nike, rely on CLO, a powerful 3D fashion design software.
Designers use CLO to stitch digital pattern pieces together. You can choose from thousands of true-to-life representations of fabrics, as material properties such as texture, gloss, and hardness are digitized.
Harmon creates accurate designs without touching fabric or seeing a live model. She drapes digital clothing over avatars, computer-generated human representations with a true-to-life look. And she uses avatars — not people — to test the fit of clothes.
College fashion programs, recognizing these tectonic shifts, are updating their curriculum accordingly. Stephens College will begin teaching CLO in Spring 2022 and MU will begin teaching in Fall 2022.
Cheyenne Smith is an assistant teaching professor in MU’s Department of Textile and Apparel Management.
She said there has been a long-term trend towards digitization in fashion, but the use of 3D design software such as CLO has increased in recent years. Students looking for 3D design experience are seeing more job descriptions.
Smith taught physical and digital techniques this fall: “My approach to pattern making this semester was teaching the students different pattern modifications on hands, 2D pattern paper one day, and doing the same thing in CLO the next. day.”
Jess Kittle is a senior in Stephen’s Fashion Design program and is designing her capital collection using CLO.
Kittle, who began planning college to study chemical engineering, eventually switched to fashion design.
She was surprised to find that 3D design software allowed her to combine two passions — “one for fashion and clothing and dressing people and one for engineering and making things work in a very tight way.” After graduation, Kittle wants to specialize in technical design.
Stephen’s Fashion Program Professor Kirsty Buchanan said learning manual design and sewing techniques is still a fundamental part of clothing design.
“You can’t start using the software and never create a design in your life,” she said.
Digital patterns must be accurate and fit perfectly because the ultimate goal of fashion design is to create real clothes for real people.
Knowledge of sewing and construction is critical, Harmon said.
“We still want people to know how clothes are physically made before they know how to evaluate them digitally.”
She set an example by designing an item with the wrong type of stitching that would easily break, prompting thousands of people to return items that were no longer useful.
“I think if you don’t know how to build something, you can make some serious mistakes,” she said.
However, when a company harnesses the power of digital design, the benefits can be immense.
“I can’t even tell you how many millions of dollars we save by not using apparel samples,” Harmon said, “and that’s just by sampling.
“3D design is extremely influential,” says Palmer. Apparel companies that digitally connect all their processes, from initial design to selling to consumers, can change the way products are manufactured and created.
Palmer offers this advice to fashion design students: “Use 3D as much as you can, as fast as you can, and as much as you can. And be open to technology, be open to trying things in new ways.
“Be prepared to look at things differently. And by differently, I mean seeing it on screen and then seeing it in real life, but being able to believe what’s on the screen is what you get in real life.”
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