Fibre2Fashion

Sometime in the early 1990s, a well-known designer in Delhi spotted a person at an upmarket shopping complex wearing a stunning outfit in cream and red. But when he took a closer look he was in for a shock, for the woman was wearing one of his own designs. Worse still, the design had not yet left his studio. The designer, obviously, queried her and discovered that she had purchased it from an upscale boutique. This creation was in a different shade, but the material was ordinary. The designer...

About a year and a half back, the showcasing of an innovation at the Shanghai Fashion Week took the world by storm. The surprise and awe with which the technology was received both there at the event as well as later in the fashion media was evident in one aspect: that the fashion world had not seen it coming. The tech world, on the other hand, had only been waiting for it to finally happen. Independent label Babyghost was showcasing its 2017 Spring and Summer collection at Shanghai in April...

The 18th Shanghai International Textile Machinery Exhibition this year will focus on the world’s latest innovative textile technologies, high-growth application sectors and cross-border technologies, thereby assisting industry to overcome challenges and trigger off new opportunities on the way to Industry 4.0. The four-day bi-annual signature event of the textiles industry of China, ShanghaiTex 2017 will be held at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre, in the city of Sanghai from November...

Scouring through old journals and magazines can throw up fascinating snippets about the past, and many of those can catch you by surprise, and set you thinking all over again. Scraping websites for cotton alternatives, at some point, can well take one to a particular report from the proceedings of a textiles-related event would make for interesting reading. It goes thus: Speaking at the annual meeting of the Bradford Dyers’ Association, recently, Sir Milton Sharp, observed that the deplorable...

Many segments of the textiles and apparel industry are not as dynamic or happening as certain others. Also, many sectors remain under the radar, far away from public gaze, simply because of the back-end nature of their work. The testing, inspection and certification (TIC) segment is one such segment that has been increasingly gaining significance in a very trying and demanding world. The demand for quality, and therefore standards and benchmarks, are increasingly becoming strident and...

A failure to find answers to domestic policy shortcomings that are responsible for today's labour market problems at the local levels could lead to global ramifications, the World Trade Organization (WTO) has warned. Governments will therefore need to meet, talk and negotiate, and arrive at cooperative “win-win” approaches to the opportunities, as well as the challenges, of ongoing global economic change, the WTO's World Trade Report 2017: Trade, technology and jobs has remarked. The 2017 World...

An uneasy calm prevails over the usually-bustling textiles hub of Surat. The phrase "uneasy calm" of course could well be a worn-out cliché; but both the unease and the calm here are stark and for real. The calm exists because the strike and simultaneous protests have been called off in the hope that the Goods and Services Tax Council will look into the grievances of the city's traders, as well their cousins elsewhere. The unease, on the other hand, self-perpetuates because the core issues that...

It's been about a year and a half since the World Apparel & Footwear Life Cycle Assessment Database (WALDB) was launched. How do you personally see the progress so far? Rainer Zah: Since we launched WALDB the interest in environmental footprinting in the apparel industry is strongly growing. Some important players joined the initiative this year like SAC (Sustainable Apparel Coalition) and LVMH. This allows us to develop even more data for the members. What has been the response of industry so...

F2F: Please tell us about the backdrop to this new product. Robert van de Kerkhof: We launched the new sustainability report in April. So the story was about how important sustainability is about Lenzing; how it is integrated into the Lenzing corporation. What are the four pillars of our sustainability strategy. And that resulted in what we call 'innovating for balance'. That's the background about what we are trying to do by driving new innovations into the market. We are trying much more to...

Professor Dilys Williams is Director of Centre for Sustainable Fashion, (CSF) a University of the Arts (UAL) Research Centre based at the London College of Fashion. Williams’ work draws on her extensive experience as a lead womenswear designer with international collections including Katharine Hamnett and Liberty alongside an internationally recognised teaching and research portfolio. Trained at Manchester Metropolitan University and holding a UAL professorship, Williams publishes widely on...