Million Dollar Idea: One Hour Suits
I’ve had a longstanding problem with mass-produced retail clothing. Not only does it not really fit anyone properly “off the rack,” what happens to all the unsold clothes at the end of a trend or season? Does anyone really know?
Now the flipside is custom tailoring, made to fit a particular person, but it usually costs as much as a used car to get a single suit made; if you pick premium wools it can cost as much as a car. Which makes sense given the relative rarity of handmade clothes vs. machine-made, if you want to make a living, but also it reflects the labour-intensive nature of the craft.
I’ve always thought that technology can be of great assistance here. There are already full-body laser scanners, mostly used to create action figures and 3D model data for CG animation, but in at least one boutique in Japan, it’s used to generate accurate body measurements.
Computer numeric controlled (CNC) laser fabric cutting machines are probably as accurate, if not more so, than human hands.
Put the two technologies together, under the supervision of traditionally-trained tailors, cutters and finishers, and you can have, in essence, a self-contained clothing factory that can turn out something much better than off-the-rack or even made-to-measure, if not quite as good as handmade Savile Row, in about a week.
Ok, the ‘one hour suit’ is still some time in the future, but if you could bring near-Savile Row quality down to the $500-$1000 mark, many more people could have access to well-fitting clothes.
Why is this posted under Environment? For one thing, it would eliminate a lot of waste in the clothing industry - clothes made on spec that, if unsold, are eventually remaindered or discarded; the energy spent and CO2 created in shipping fabric from country of origin to country of manufacture, and then country of purchase.
It’s one more step towards the reconciliation of atoms vs. bits in our economy — in the future we will download licensed designs from the iTunes Fabric + Clothing Store, to be interpreted in local sustainable materials (or have licensed fabric designs also manufactured locally), then digitally tailored, again at a local facility.
Like any McLuhanesque medium, e-clothing will obsolete the sweatshops of current mass manufacturing, but also bring back something else; the local, trained and highly skilled tailors and weavers.
March 2, 2007 1:11 AM
Cool idea!
As to your question “what happens to all the unsold clothes at the end of a trend or season?” The answer is: “it’s sent to ‘Winners’.”
wrote blork on March 2, 2007 12:05 PM