Textiles

Certain events serve as weathercocks—they tell you which way the wind is blowing, or, at times, beginning to blow. Textile machinery fairs are something like that. Since textile machineries call for huge investments that need to be planned years ahead—and given that no company would want to pump in monies unless they were sure those would not blow away in the wind—the interest generated in these events can vouchsafe be taken as indicators of the shape that industry may take. The ITM Istanbul is...

Whenever the discussion hovers around India's relatively modest apparel exports and how the country has been losing ground to smaller countries in the great apparel supply war, Turkey invariably figures among those though to be stealing a march over India. But then, the cherry-picking of Turkey in the context is misleading—for it is like no other. Its textiles are steeped in history, its cotton is part of lore, and its flamboyance cannot be matched. It is a country that compares more to China...

A new amendment to a European Union legislation has modified several provisions related to textile fibre names and associated with labelling and marking of the fibre composition of textile products. It has also accepted the nomenclature of a new textile fibre called polyacrylate. The new law, Commission Delegated Regulation 2018/122, which entered into force on February 15, amends a number of sections and definitions of the existing legislation, Regulation 1007/2011. According to the preamble to...

Cotton Council International (CCI), the export promotion arm of the National Cotton Council of America (NCC), is a non-profit trade association that promotes US cotton fibre and manufactured cotton products around the globe with the Cotton USA trademark. CCI has 60 years of experience promoting US cotton fibre and products to trade and consumers, and works with spinning mills, fabric and garment manufacturers, brands, retailers, textile associations, governments and the USDA to facilitate the...

Not always do big-ticket events or headline-grabbing incidents dominate the developments over a calendar year; more so in the textiles and apparel industry where the throwing of a stone into a pond creates ripples years later. On the other hand, quite often in fact, there are silent developments that tend to have a bigger long-term impact on the fashion scheme of things. The year gone by was one such phase, with many key developments of 2017 not causing a stir. # 1) Digitalise, or be done with...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...