Optimising the amount of base material used for manufacturing garments with creases, during their design stage

Abstract

The clothing and fashion industry is known as a wasteful industry. Despite its target, producing fashionable and beautiful items to fulfil the needs of different consumer categories consumes a considerable quantity of raw materials, energy, water, labour force, etc. Every year, natural resources become more limited, hard to find and expensive; in these terms, the producers are forced to find either alternative solutions to replace as much as they can the needed primary raw materials or to try to maximise their use (which means to reduce the quantity of waste) or to use the waste to produce other things. The consumption of raw materials is determined during the development stage of the new model: the designer analyses the sketch of the selected model, then establishes and applies the needed steps to design the model pieces, creates the 3D virtual or supervises the manufacturing process of the physical prototype to verify the design solution, applies changes after analysing the prototype if it is necessary, obtains the production patterns and then he/she is doing the markers to determine the consumption of raw materials for one item and the whole order. Garment models with creases, pleats or folds are the most challenging ones because the designer has to have the ability to understand and to evaluate the shadows or the number of grouped lines of the model into values of distances or angles, to be used to change the element surface for their realisation. In these cases, it is essential to balance what the model requires and the needed amount of raw materials to produce it. This paper proposes some variants of how to resize the surfaces of the elements for designing creases but with an optimal raw material consumption level. The results are based on the analysis of different men jacket models’, with straight silhouette and creases between the hemline and its hem band.