It’s hard to maintain up with the ever-changing trends of the style world. What’s “in” one minute is commonly out of favor the following season, potentially causing you to re-evaluate your wardrobe.
Staying current with the most recent fashion styles will be wasteful and expensive, though. Roughly 92 million tons of textile waste are produced annually, including the garments we discard after they exit of favor or now not fit. But what if we could simply reassemble our clothes into whatever outfits we wanted, adapting to trends and the ways our bodies change?
A team of researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Adobe try to bring eco-friendly, versatile garments to life. Their recent “Refashion” software system breaks down fashion design into modules — essentially, smaller constructing blocks — by allowing users to attract, plan, and visualize each element of a clothing item. The tool turns fashion ideas right into a blueprint that outlines methods to assemble each component into reconfigurable clothing, equivalent to a pair of pants that will be transformed right into a dress.
With Refashion, users simply draw shapes and place them together to develop a top level view for adaptable fashion pieces. It’s a visible diagram that shows methods to cut garments, providing an easy method to design things like a shirt with an attachable hood for rainy days. One could also create a skirt that may then be reconfigured right into a dress for a proper dinner, or maternity wear that matches during different stages of pregnancy.
“We desired to create garments that consider reuse from the beginning,” says Rebecca Lin, MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) PhD student, CSAIL and Media Lab researcher, and lead writer on a paper presenting the project. “Most clothes you purchase today are static, and are discarded once you now not want them. Refashion as a substitute makes essentially the most of our garments by helping us design items that will be easily resized, repaired, or restyled into different outfits.”
Modules à la mode
The researchers conducted a preliminary user study where each designers and novices explored Refashion and were in a position to create garment prototypes. Participants assembled pieces equivalent to an asymmetric top that may very well be prolonged right into a jumpsuit, or remade right into a formal dress, often inside half-hour. These results suggest that Refashion has the potential to make prototyping garments more approachable and efficient. But what features might contribute to this ease of use?
Its interface first presents an easy grid in its “Pattern Editor” mode, where users can connect dots to stipulate the boundaries of a clothing item. It’s essentially drawing rectangular panels and specifying how different modules will connect with one another.
Users can customize the form of every component, create a straight design for garments (which is perhaps useful for less form-fitting items, like chinos) or perhaps tinkering with considered one of Refashion’s templates. A user can edit pre-designed blueprints for things like a T-shirt, fitted shirt, or trousers.
One other, more creative route is to alter the design of individual modules. One can select the “pleat” feature to fold a garment over itself, much like an accordion, for starters. It’s a useful method to design something like a maxi dress. The “gather” option adds an artsy flourish, where a garment is crumpled together to create puffy skirts or sleeves. A user might even go together with the “dart” module, which removes a triangular piece from the material. It allows for shaping a garment on the waist (perhaps for a pencil skirt) or tailor to the upper body (fitted shirts, for example).
While it might sound that every of those components must be sewn together, Refashion enables users to attach garments through more flexible, efficient means. Edges will be seamed together via double-sided connectors equivalent to metal snaps (just like the buttons used to shut a denim jacket) or Velcro dots. A user could also fasten them in pins called brads, which have a pointed side that they stick through a hole and split into two “legs” to connect to a different surface; it’s a handy method to secure, say, an image on a poster board. Each connective methods make it easy to reconfigure modules, should they be damaged or a “fit check” calls for a brand new look.
As a user designs their clothing piece, the system routinely creates a simplified diagram of how it may possibly be assembled. The pattern is split into numbered blocks, which is dragged onto different parts of a 2D mannequin to specify the position of every component. The user can then simulate how their sustainable clothing will look on 3D models of a variety of body types (one may also upload a model).
Finally, a digital blueprint for sustainable clothing can extend, shorten, or mix with other pieces. Due to Refashion, a brand new piece may very well be emblematic of a possible shift in fashion: As a substitute of shopping for recent clothes each time we wish a brand new outfit, we are able to simply reconfigure existing ones. Yesterday’s scarf may very well be today’s hat, and today’s T-shirt may very well be tomorrow’s jacket.
“Rebecca’s work is at an exciting intersection between computation and art, craft, and design,” says MIT EECS professor and CSAIL principal investigator Erik Demaine, who advises Lin. “I’m excited to see how Refashion could make custom fashion design accessible to the wearer, while also making clothes more reusable and sustainable.”
Constant change
While Refashion presents a greener vision for the long run of fashion, the researchers note that they’re actively improving the system. They intend to revise the interface to support more durable items, stepping beyond standard prototyping fabrics. Refashion may soon support other modules, like curved panels, as well. The CSAIL-Adobe team can also evaluate whether their system can use as few materials as possible to reduce waste, and whether it may possibly help “remix” old store-bought outfits.
Lin also plans to develop recent computational tools that help designers create unique, personalized outfits using colours and textures. She’s exploring methods to design clothing by patchwork — essentially, cutting out small pieces from materials like decorative fabrics, recycled denim, and crochet blocks and assembling them right into a larger item.
“That is an amazing example of how computer-aided design may also be key in supporting more sustainable practices in the style industry,” says Adrien Bousseau, a senior researcher at Inria Centre at Université Côte d’Azur who wasn’t involved within the paper. “By promoting garment alteration from the bottom up, they developed a novel design interface and accompanying optimization algorithm that helps designers create garments that may undergo an extended lifetime through reconfiguration. While sustainability often imposes additional constraints on industrial production, I’m confident that research just like the one by Lin and her colleagues will empower designers in innovating despite these constraints.”
Lin wrote the paper with Adobe Research scientists Michal Lukáč and Mackenzie Leake, who’s the paper’s senior writer and a former CSAIL postdoc. Their work was supported, partially, by the MIT Morningside Academy for Design, an MIT MAKE Design-2-Making Mini-Grant, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. The researchers presented their work recently on the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.