Trash Fashion - KNIT TO FIT

Today, cheap clothes are made to fit the general population, resulting in people buying clothes that don’t fit well. Or they just don’t get sold so end up as land fill waste. Knit to Fit aims at reducing the throw away fashion idea and merge the benefits of bespoke tailoring with mass production. The process involves a full body scan to get the full measurements of the entire body of the customer, in a 360 degree view. Colour, style and fit preferences are discussed and decided beforehand as the information is sent to a specialised knitting machine which creates a 3D garment. This process uses absolutely no waste and creates a perfectly fitting knitted garment. It also minimises the steps in manufacture which leads to less energy usage and no waste from pattern cutting

What I found very interesting was the idea put forward by proffessor Sandy Black (the inventor of Knit to Fit) which was that one day the customer will all have our exact 3D body measurements on individual swipe cards which they can then take to the high street and order a garment that is bespoke to them.

SOUND AS A TEXTILE?

I believe that textiles reach out to the senses and in doing so evoke emotions and call upon memories, through touch, sight and even smell. Designer Berit Greinke has a fascination however with textiles and sound, and while in most cases we observe only the visual and tactile nature of a fabric, Greinke explores the way we cross from one sense to another by introducing the element of sound.

“As textiles are used in order to absorb sound in architecture. Can it work the other way round and textiles become amplifiers for sounds?”

Part of Greinke’s thesis of amplifying sound included research into the Music Textile created by Maurin Donneaud and Vincent Roudaut, which I found very interesting. It involves two fabrics, both with conductive threads woven through in opposite directions. The two fabrics are fixed to a frame and when a person touches it any single point, the two fabrics connect and a current is sent to a computer which converts to sound. This concept opens up possibilities relating to textiles and communication or could be used as a performance piece. If the musical fabric were to be made into clothing, a performer could create sounds through movement. It also could be developed for use with deaf and blind people to help them communicate.

LIGHT AS A TEXTILE?

Aqua Light, designed by Lin Yun-Lien, combines textiles and lighting. Inspired by the bio-luminescent qualities of jellyfish, the curtain uses solar panels, fibre optics and LEDs and intends to help people who are afraid of the dark to sleep easily.

Kathy Schicker also developed a collection of light-emitting and colour changing textiles called Woven Light. The fabrics change colour when exposed to light or emit light when the sun has gone down by using solar powered fibres and threads that glow in the dark. It reacts subtly to the time of day and changing seasons. This is ground breaking technology in terms of sustainable textiles as it requires only sunlight to work.