Reports

If the fashion industry has to go truly circular, it will need to pick up the thread from where the longwinding value chain of the industry currently trails off--in the humongous piles of post-consumer textile waste, an estimated 92 million tonnes generated annually at the last count. It would need a colossal effort on part of industry to turn that waste back into acceptable fashion. And, it would need to be done in a creative and stylish manner. Or else, how could that be fashion? The world...

The easing of sourcing norms in single brand retail trade (SBRT) by the Union Cabinet on Wednesday last will considerably alter the retail landscape in the country. Even though, under the new norms, the compulsion on single brands to open brick-and-mortar stores before venturing into online trade has been moderated, it will now be easier for them to test the waters before going the whole hog. The SBRT announcement came along with a flurry of other decisions related to foreign direct investment...

Clothing, as we know, came into being when human beings learnt to sew. The art of sewing remains at the core of garments thousands of years later. It remains labour-intensive as things stand, and it is on this front that the sewing machinery industry is likely to see the most cutting-edge developments in the immediate future. Manufacturers of sewing machines—of the industrial scale, obviously—are possibly among the most under pressure from apparel manufacturers to help the latter cut costs. In...

The import and the scale of the event was such that even as it was palpably drawing to an end, no one was talking of the goings-on at ITMA 2019 Barcelona, but ITMA Milan 2023. Indeed. Textile technology—textile innovation, if you may—is moving at such a frenetic pace that what you would have seen today in Barcelona might just as well be obsolete by the time you are home. That, of course, is a hyperbole, but you get the drift. Themed around ‘Innovating the World of Textiles’, the 18 th edition of...

Every four years, the global textiles-apparel-fashion industry converges at ITMA. If there are a number of #mustattend events out there, this would be the mother of them all. It is an event that in many ways not only shapes the future of industry, but just living as well. And as the ITMA Services, which is organising ITMA 2019 at Barcelona this month, says on its website: “ITMA is the trendsetting textile and garment technology platform where the industry converges every four years to explore...

Close to half a lakh people from across the world would be converging in Frankfurt, Germany in mid-May. They would be flocking to the Techtextil event for a reason—leading international exhibitors will be presenting the entire spectrum of technical textiles, functional apparel textiles and textile technologies at the Messe Frankfurt event. Texprocess, the leading trade fair for the garment manufacturing and textile processing industry, will take place concurrently with Techtextil. Visitors will...

There are many who believe, not wrongly, that the best and safest bet to start an apparel business is with t-shirts. It is a product category that has hardly seen a perceptible dip in sales—right from the 1950s when Marlon Brando and James Dean made them popular, hip and chic. There are far too many angles to look at, and most of them still ring true—some truer then before. T-shirts remain fashion essentials and timeless. They are still a medium of expression, as they were when Disney-character...

If it is readymade, it is quite likely that it is not perfect; not for the body at least. And since the fashion industry virtually stands with a backbone made of readymade garments, the age-old problem suddenly appears to be one of imperfection (in the fashion industry). The apparel sector is seized of the issue, and professionals across the value chain are grappling with a worn-out issue that has found a new fabric. Take two relatively recent developments. In June last year, six major British...

Deliveries of new short-staple spindles and long-staple spindles respectively improved by 8 per cent and 46 per cent from 2016 to 2017. The number of shipped draw-texturing spindles and shuttle-less looms increased by 23 per cent and 14 per cent. Shipments of new electronic flat knitting machines and finishing machines of the category "fabric discontinuous" each rose by 70 per cent year-on-year. In contrast, deliveries of finishing machines of the category "fabrics continuous" rose by 5 per cent...

That one form of energy can be transformed into another is a fundamental law of nature, nay physics. So, when someone says that kinetic energy can be converted into electricity, that would raise no eyebrows. But when someone claims to have developed a fabric which does precisely that, many in the textiles industry would be snapped into rapt attention. Such a fabric has indeed been developed by researchers at the Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden. Researchers Anja Lund and...