Guest Post By Daniel Zeltzer, Marketing Director of Los Angeles based fashion brand XCVI Clothing.

Sustainable Business Practices and Computational Design for Garments?

Is fashion design really possible on a computer? It’s hard to work with garments without touching the fabrics and getting a real feel for the product, but more and more designers are reaching towards technology to help them create unique designs. Have we reached the age of “computer generated garments”?

Not quite, but…technological innovations are certainly helping talented people work to their fullest creative potential.

The process from sketch to actual garment, with all of its iterations and changes to the design – pattern, fit, etc –  are rather wasteful. What happens when the designer is not happy with the final iteration of her creation? The manufacturer loses materials, money, and time and has to start the process over again with yet another sketch.

And you can imagine the magnitude of losses when dealing with the larger, more expensive and expansive productions?

Architects, for instance, have completely moved away from sketches and built models to reduce waste and repeated steps. At the FMX conference in Germany last week, I had the pleasure of learning about architectural processes from associates at the Zaha Hadid Architects, where designers use computerized tools that allow them greater scope.  Using these tools,  designers can incorporate environmental and social contexts of the project they’re working on, as well as engineering technicalities and costs, and can even analyze each design iteration’s saleability features.

And in the luxury automotive industry, where cars are offered with hundreds of small detail features, designers are using computer generated images (i.e. F_Box Picture Shooter by Mackevision) to show their customers what their final product would look like – thereby cutting the tremendous cost and waste it would otherwise take to produce each product variation.

Essentially, technological innovation allows designers in all fields to have greater integration with production, while at the same time minimizing cost and waste.

And while we’re not in the architecture or automotive manufacturing industries, our business model resembles theirs in its sustainability: we are a cut-to-order operation, which means we only produce the garments per our customers’ orders (as opposed to selling from existing stock). In these types of businesses, the possibilities of variation in design are endless.

Now if we could only find the right technological tool for fashion design…know of any?

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