New York Fashion Week is kicking off next Thursday and, while anticipation grows about new collections, questions and doubts remain about the future of such events and of the industry in general.
Things are indeed changing at a very fast rhythm, at times without the major players in the industry even realising it. The main changes are coming via technological innovations: while until a few years ago we had computer-assisted design software, the potential of algorithms is currently being explored on a style and design level. Yet further innovations may be coming for what regards advanced manufacturing and a new generation of industrial robots, like the Sewbots™ devised by Atlanta-based machine and robotics startup SoftWear Automation Inc..
Founded in 2007 by a group of engineers from Georgia Tech's Advanced Technology Development Center, SoftWear Automation spent years researching the possibility of industrial machines working with soft materials. Working with cloth is indeed rather tricky and complex because a fabric moves, stretches and changes shapes, so it needs a human hand to make sure seams stay straight, that's why so far robots have been mainly working on rigid materials such as metal or plastics.
In 2012 the company received a $1.8 million grant from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and started developing a range of sewn goods worklines for Home Goods, Footwear & Apparel.
Each sewbot developed presented a distinct set of skills and capabilities: the first one - the LOWRY system, developed in 2015 - was a four-axis robot that can be used for fabric handling, pick and place operations, as well as direct sewing and creating button holes in a shirt.
SoftWear went on experimenting with a machine that could make bathmats and towels and eventually developed one that can produce denims and T-shirts.
SoftWear Automation's latest robotic sewing line can make a T-shirt every 26 seconds, reducing the cost of each piece to 33¢. The machine reproduces the phases a garment worker goes through to make a T-shirt, moving the material while sewing, sewing the seams, adding sleeves and finishing with a label.
A Chinese company, Tianyuan Garments Co. - based in the Suzhou Industrial Park, producing for biggest apparel makers in China and supplying major brand including Adidas, Armani and Reebok (just to mention a few...) - has recently bought 330 robots from SoftWear Automation Inc.
The bots will be installed in its new Arkansas-based plant, opening in 2018, where its 21 robotic production lines will be able to produce 1.2 million T-shirts a year.
It is becoming more and more obvious now that technological innovations will have different impacts on multiple levels of the fashion industry: while algorithms may become the stars of key phases such as the design/style, marketing and sale processes, robotic applications will introduce new possibilities at the manufacturing stage.
This is only natural as, while fashion companies have all jumped on the technology bandwagon (some of them without really understanding what to do with the modern technology available to us...), the garment industry has been painfully slower to automate and there have been very few changes since sewing machines were invented in the 1800s.
There may be positive impacts from the introduction of such technology: SoftWear Automation's machines may help reducing human exploitation and bring further innovation with garment makers turning into machine operators or supervisors. Sustainability may also improve as material waste and carbon footprints would be reduced.
The company promises that there will be more advanced and precise machines in a few years' time, even though it also highlights that higher-end clothing will always be made by humans and that they would never work on something as complicated as a bridal dress.
Yet, while there are obvious pros behind such machines, some critics state things may dramatically change and for the worse: garment workers in the lowest-wage countries in the world may see their jobs being threatened if major companies à la H&M ever decided to relocate their production in other places (consider that more than 4 million people work - often in very unsafe conditions - in the garment industry in Bangladesh and the majority of the country's exports is still clothing).
These workers could be retrained for more high-tech jobs or they could be employed to do more artisanal jobs at higher wages, but are we sure companies would be keen to spend money on their training or on better and more expensive products considering that, for years, most fashion groups have run on a "minimise costs, maximise profits" rule? Besides, while the machines break exploitative labour practices, they also offer products at an even lower price, ending up creating a sort of "faster" version of the "fast garment industry".
At the moment SoftWear Automation's machines are rather expensive (Tianyuan Garments invested $20 million in its 100,000-square foot factory in Arkansas) and they consume a lot of electricity, so cheap labor in countries like Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam and Cambodia still makes more sense to factory owners than investing in robots.
This may change, though, when more competitors arrive on the market and develop similar machines (in April 2017 Amazon filed a patent for "stitch on demand" technology that would sew clothing after an order is placed; the patent shows a machine similar to the ones developed by SoftWear Automation - View this photo), a process that may have further human consequences like displacing or replacing low-wage garment workers.
For the time being SoftWear Automation's machines are only sold in the US (note that products maufactured in the States with such machines will benefit from the "Made in USA" label; the military, for example, can only buy clothes made in the U.S.) and while the Tianyuan factory in Little Rock, Arkansas, will provide 400 jobs, China remains the world's largest garment exporter with a structured supply network that produces not just finished garments, but also manufactures yarns, dyes and small parts, like buttons, fasteners or zippers.
In a way the next industrial revolution may be more complex than we may think and will be played inside factories with innovative manufacturing machines and on computers, on a software level. What's for sure, though, is that, as it happened in previous industrial revolutions, fully-automated solutions will create new job opportunities and destroy others, so factories working with fashion companies should maybe start looking for ways to retrain their workforce as soon as possible.
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