REDESIGN to Help Sustainability in Fashion Clothing
The Past can Teach the Present How to Redesign the Future
This story is a response to a Boston Globe article, Jan. 11, 2024, by Thomas Lee: “With consumers pledging to reuse, businesses are buying in. … an ecosystem has become more mainstream to encourage consumers and businesses to reduce overconsumption and overproduction …”
Lee is right about consumers getting involved and reducing overconsumption but does not understand the different sections of apparel businesses. Consumers wear clothing, and retail stores sell clothing. But it is the manufacturers that design and produce clothing. The word brand can be used by anyone, and it does not tell you what they do. Celebrities wear clothing and are advertisements of brands, and not accused of overconsumption. Retail stores do buy quantities, but primarily to have the right assortments of many sizes, and fittings to satisfy many different needs. One of the reasons that there is so much junk on the market is because retailers, in reducing, buy “one size fits all”, and seldom consider different fittings for various people — because buyers do not know about fitting. [My experience of over 30 years of design and manufacturing in the fashion industry, tells me that.]
Very few retail stores produce. By using the word brand, Lee did not separate the retail stores from manufacturers, who design ideas, engineer patterns and engineer systems for producing the clothing. And, it is important to note that manufacturers most often design and make what the retail stores will buy.
It is too simplistic to say stop overproduction and overconsumption. Consumers and many stores are reducing the buying of clothing. Let’s please go to where we must do the research: to designers and manufacturers and then to education to learn and teach designers and makers how to REDESIGN clothing to make them able to be Re-done, and REDESIGN used clothing for overall sustainability.
Another sad thing that Lee mentions is, “Retailers are starting to reduce the number of newly created products they are willing to sell.” From my perspective, consumers are complaining about the dumb stuff in the stores, at least with clothing. Most young creative designers are not finding work to create clothing. We must look at all perspectives to understand problems in sustainability. The “Re…” is important, “REdesign, REpair, REwear”.
Mass-Produced Custom (MPC)
In the 1980s, I won a few engineering design grant awards from the National Science Foundation, for my creative ideas in the Fashion industry, as Stylometrics, Inc. One of those ideas was Mass-Produced Custom.
My background was ideal. I was a custom designer in the 1950s, which taught me many of the creative styles and fitting needs of middle-class women. Then, Shirley Willett, Inc. was developed to successfully design and manufacture fashion apparel for 20 years, with having learned production as a factory stitcher in the 1940s.
Each consumer that did not fit a standard size and shape would have a “Personal Fit Model” (PFM), for a simple change or a few changes. The first photo below shows a simple problem of swaying back in a standard skirt. The second photo shows the skirt of a consumer’s PFM and taking in excess for a sway back. Now, instead of having to rip and fix every skirt she buys, this information on her PFM goes to the factory every time she orders a garment.
A stitcher in the factory, assigned to MPC, has a computer screen in front of her machine. She will take the appropriate size cut skirt from a pile of mass production and follow what the computer shows in a picture of the cut skirt piece, how much she must take off the waist to fit properly. It takes the stitcher only one minute to make the change.
This one is simple, but I had prepared to do many other kinds of fittings for individual shapings. Unfortunately, academia loved me and these ideas, but to go further, I had to get the industry to work with me. In the 1980s and 1990s, men in industry and technology said a woman could not know engineering. I later learned that most in the garment industry no longer came from the factory floor as I did: stitchers, pressers, patternmakers, etc. I sincerely weep, not for me, but for the realization that this simple idea of Mass Produced Custom cannot help my beloved industry from designing, making and selling junk.
Thank you for reading
