A bright future for diversifying fashion design
Will custom fit garment technologies diversify fashion?
Once a year - I take the long journey out of small town West Virginia to visit my family home in California. My ritual for this trip involves splurging on a bunch of fashion magazines that I spend hours reading through on the plane, balancing them in one hand, with airplane snacks and coffee in the other. I imagine that I am peaking my head out at the world to see what the rich and famous are wearing - what inspires them. This year I noticed a surprising subtext in the articles I read, which seemed to say: “Our opinion on what you are wearing STILL matters! We are still relevant!” Which gave me the distinct impression that maybe VOGUE or Harper’s BAZAAR’s opinion on fashion doesn’t matter so much anymore, that the once strong hold that New York or London or Paris had on fashion is loosening - maybe even disintegrating.
And this got the wheels in my noodle turning. In a few short weeks I am supposed to begin learning a new pattern making software - Browzwear to test out my teacher’s assertion that we have finally come to a place in fashion design where we can virtually tailor our designs, and thus make one garment tailored to each client without needing to conduct an in person fitting. Compare this to our current reality where, for each design, we must make a range of sizes, say 0-24 and hope that our clients can fit into one of those sizes. I’ve written about the waste of this previously and the incompatibility of this model with living wages for sewers and textile fiber farmers. But there is another impact - one which greatly impacts the fashion artists we are able to see and enjoy in the world.
It is tough to be born with the dream of being a fashion designer - our cost of materials to produce something we are dreaming of is high - fabric, notions (buttons, zippers, buckles etc.), sewing equipment, help for the parts of the work we choose not to take on like say pattern making or fine sewing. And then, if you want to share your work with the world, or sustain yourself with it, you need a huge amount of capital to make a run of sizes, in different colors, in different styles, enough to grab some attention, get it in the right places where people are buying it (to say nothing of advertising costs). So there is a reason that so few apparel companies are successful and the ones that are, are spending gobs of money to get them successfully off the ground. Which, needless to say, greatly limits who is able to pursue this work. The barriers to creating garment designs results in the type of designs that we see in fashion magazines. If we note designs that are only suitable for riding in a cab (or private car) in New York City or teetering around an art opening or perhaps sitting still for an evening at the theater, it is easy to see that the designers designing them are mostly children of an extremely wealthy - high culture.
And so - as I sit, perched on a new beginning in my apparel work, with a new software and a new chance to make visible a long held dream of my custom fit womenswear designs, I wonder about the stronghold of traditional fashion epicenters, and how the ability to much more affordably make custom fit clothing will impact the diversity of fashion designs in our lives. If, for example, a designer needs only a roll or two of fabric and a few hundred dedicated clients, and a free software, a computer, access to a large printer, maybe a pattern maker and photographer - how many more designers will we have the opportunity to share their work, their dreams? And how will it change the ecosystem of fashion design as we know it? Now, all the sudden, someone in a rural area, or a small city in the Southwestern U.S., or who lives in a small town in Appalachia or who is living at home with their aging parents with an internet connection, can create and share designs with customers. It makes me so excited to think about this. What will inspire them? What will happen when we begin to see fashions inspired by smaller towns and the natural world and not just cityscapes and “high culture”?
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And what kinds of artifacts of these diverse places will influence them, like local embroidery, or natural dyes, or quilting techniques, or bead work? It can be hard to look towards the future and see more creativity, hope and connection, but this belief in the bright future of fashion is so alive for me that it showers dreams of colors, shapes and diverse, creative talent parading in beautiful, unique garments.
Stay tuned! I will continue to write about it and my work to strengthen the textile ecosystem in West Virginia here. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to help support this work.
Sincerely,
Reid