Thursday, April 03, 2008

manufacturing without creating fabric waste

Yesterday I came across the blog for the Queen's Business Forum on the Fashion Industry and a post (scroll down for that beautiful image of Mark's work) that referred to Kathleen's posts about me and Mark Liu at Fashion Incubator. The comment, "This technique is hardly practical for commercial production (at least right away)", is most interesting to me. Throughout the project 'manufacturability' has been a consideration for me; I want the collection to be production-ready, rather than a series of one-off, craft/art garments. There will be a lot of hand-done embellishments, for sure, but I've never thought these are an impediment for small-scale 'mass'-production (though they increase the prices, of course). When I had my label, a few pieces always incorporated hand embroidery, for example. But, with the collection, I am looking at a lot of texts on manufacturing as my guide while I'm designing and making, such as Kathleen's book (I wish everyone in fashion owned this), and texts by Gerry Cooklin, David J. Tyler and many more. I've just been invited to talk about my research to the R&D team of a large Australian manufacturer, and it'll be interesting to see the reactions there. It should prove quite helpful in addressing issues of manufacturing in the discussion part of my thesis.

But, thanks to Amanda at the Q'BFFI blog for the heads up!

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