It's hard to keep up with the ever-changing trends in the fashion world. What's “in” one moment often goes out of fashion the next season, which may mean you need to re-evaluate your wardrobe.
However, staying up to date with the latest fashion styles can be wasteful and expensive. More or less 92 million tons textile waste is produced annually, including the clothes we throw away when they go out of style or don't fit. But what if we could simply fold our clothes into whatever outfits we wanted, adapting to trends and the way our bodies change?
A team of researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Adobe are trying to bring eco-friendly, versatile clothing to life. Their new “Processing” The software system divides fashion design into modules – essentially smaller building blocks – allowing users to draw, plan and visualize each item of clothing. The tool turns fashion ideas into a blueprint for how to assemble each item into a customizable garment, such as a pair of pants that can be transformed into a dress.
With Refashion, users simply draw shapes and combine them to develop the outline of customizable fashion items. This is a visual diagram showing how to cut clothing, providing an easy way to design things like a shirt with a detachable hood for rainy days. You can also create a skirt that can then be transformed into a dress for a formal dinner or a maternity outfit that fits at different stages of pregnancy.
“We wanted to create clothing that was reusable from the start,” says Rebecca Lin, a doctoral student in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), CSAIL and Media Lab researcher, and lead author of the paper paper presenting the project. “Most clothes you buy today are static and thrown away when you no longer need them. Refashion instead makes the most of our clothes by helping us design items that can be easily changed, repaired or swapped for different outfits.”
Fashionable modules
The researchers conducted an initial user study during which both designers and novices became familiar with ReFashion and were able to create clothing prototypes. Participants assembled items such as an asymmetrical top that could be stretched into a jumpsuit or transformed into a formal dress, often within 30 minutes. These results suggest that Refashion can make apparel prototyping more accessible and efficient. But what features can contribute to this ease of use?
Its interface first presents a simple grid in “Pattern Editor” mode, where users can connect dots to draw the boundaries of a clothing item. This basically involves drawing rectangular panels and determining how the different modules will connect to each other.
Users can customize the shape of each item, create a simple clothing design (which can be useful for less fitted items like chinos), or perhaps tinker with one of Refashion's templates. The user can edit pre-designed designs for items such as a T-shirt, fitted blouse or pants.
Another, more creative way is to change the design of individual modules. To start with, you can select the “pleat” function to fold your clothes over themselves, just like an accordion. This is a useful way to design something like a maxi dress. The 'gather' option adds an artistic touch when the garment is scrunched up to create puffy skirts or sleeves. The user can even use a “dart” module that removes a triangular piece from the fabric. It allows you to adjust clothing at the waist (e.g. pencil skirt) or to fit the upper part of the body (e.g. fitted shirts).
While it might seem like each of these items requires sewing together, Refashion allows users to connect garments in a more flexible and efficient way. The edges can be sewn together using double-sided fasteners such as metal snaps (like the buttons used to fasten a denim jacket) or Velcro dots. The user can also attach them using pins called studs, which have a pointed side that can be inserted through a hole and split into two “legs” for attachment to another surface; it's a convenient way to protect, say, a photo on a poster board. Both connection methods make it easy to reconfigure modules in the event of damage or a “fit check” that requires a new look.
When the user designs his or her item of clothing, the system automatically creates a simplified assembly diagram. The pattern is divided into numbered blocks that are dragged onto different parts of the 2D mannequin to determine the position of each element. The user can then simulate the appearance of their sustainable clothing on 3D models of different body types (you can also upload the model).
Finally, the digital design of sustainable clothing can be extended, shortened or combined with other elements. Thanks to Refashion, a new item can symbolize a potential change in fashion: instead of buying new clothes every time we want a new outfit, we can simply reconfigure existing ones. Yesterday's scarf can be today's hat, and today's T-shirt can be tomorrow's jacket.
“Rebecca's work is at the exciting intersection of computation with art, craft and design,” says MIT EECS professor and CSAIL principal investigator Erik Demaine, who advises Lin. “I'm excited to see how Refashion can make custom fashion designs accessible to the user while also making clothes more eco-friendly and reusable.”
Constant change
While Refashion presents a greener vision of the future of fashion, researchers note that they are actively improving the system. They intend to change the interface to support more durable items, going beyond the standard prototype fabrics. Refashion may soon also support other modules, such as curved panels. The CSAIL-Adobe team can also evaluate whether their system can use as few materials as possible to minimize waste, and whether it can help “remix” old store-bought clothes.
Lin also plans to develop new computational tools that will help designers create unique, personalized outfits using colors and textures. She explores how to design clothes using the patchwork method – essentially cutting out small pieces from materials such as decorative fabrics, recycled denim and crochet blocks, and then assembling them into a larger item.
“This is a great example of how computer-aided design can play a key role in supporting more sustainable practices in the fashion industry,” says Adrien Bousseau, a senior research fellow at the Inria Center at the Université Côte d'Azur, who was not involved in the publication. “By promoting garment reworking from the ground up, a novel design interface and accompanying optimization algorithm has been developed to help designers create garments that can last longer through reconfiguration. While sustainability often places additional constraints on industrial production, I am confident that research such as that conducted by Lin and her colleagues will enable designers to innovate despite these constraints.”
Lin wrote the paper with Adobe Research scientists Michal Lukáč and Mackenzie Leake, who is the paper's lead author and a former CSAIL postdoc. Their work was supported in part by the MIT Morningside Design Academy, the MIT MAKE Design-2-Making mini-grant, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. The researchers recently presented their work at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.
