¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ

ANOTHER Industrial Revolution is under way in the textile business,
bringing an end to familiar working practices and throwing skilled artisans
out of their jobs. Unlike the events that transformed England in the early
1800s, the new revolution is affecting the entire industrialised world in
one go, and its progress can be measured in years rather than decades. This
time the power behind the change is computers rather than steam, and the
employees at risk are the designers and artists who create the fabrics that
go into clothing, linens and upholstery.

According to Tom Schlageter, the director of European operations for
AVL Looms, a Californian manufacturer of looms, the transformation of textile
design took off in 1983. For several years, AVL had been experimenting with
computers to design patterns and to control looms. In 1983, the firm took
its software, which can run on a personal computer, to the International
Textile Machinery Association trade fair in Milan. ‘We were the only ones
at the show with a computer loom . . . and every loom maker came by to look
at it.’ The firm demonstrated how it used the computer to design patterns
and to weave samples of these on the computer screen.

This approach is the essence of the revolution in textile design. Designers
can now turn yarn into fabric and sketch a garment from the fabric without
leaving their workstations. A design process that took weeks or months can
now be over in less than 24 hours. The images on colour monitors and those
reproduced by colour printers are so realistic that buyers from department
stores, who once insisted on seeing and touching sample garments, are now
willing to commit millions of pounds to a new range of clothes after looking
at a design on a computer screen or seeing a print-out . Although only a
minority of the world’s textile designers, fabric manufacturers and garment
makers have switched to computers so far, many more have begun to investigate
the concept.

Jack Halliwell, the consultant who introduced computers to Tootal Fabrics,
a British clothing manufacturer based in Manchester, describes how the firm
used to create a new line of men’s shirts before it invested more than half
a million pounds in computer technology. A fabric designer would sketch
out a weave plan on graph paper, and choose colours from a chart provided
by yarn makers. A skilled painter then painstakingly copied the design onto
a piece of hardboard, trying to include every yarn and to match each colour
precisely. For a quote on the fabric cost from Japan, which is the base
of Tootal’s most distant supplier, the company sent the painted sample by
courier to the mill. Only after receiving the quote did Tootal show the
sample to buyers from Britain’s major department stores, which are based
in London. If the buyers approved the design without any changes, which
was a very unlikely event, Tootal told the mills in Japan to buy yarns and
begin weaving.

Tootal now lets a computer do the hard work. Its designers select a
weave pattern and the yarn colours, which are keyed to individual yarns
in the mills’ inventories, and then they watch the fabric appear on their
monitors. They can modify the design – make the stripe a bit broader, the
blue a bit deeper, or change a pink background to a red one and insert checks
between the stripes – before printing a paper copy of the fabric for senior
directors to inspect the designs. After approval, the design is sent over
the international telecommunications network to an identical computer and
printer at the mills in Japan, using a modem at each end of the link. When
the bid comes back, the design is distributed in the same way to Tootal’s
London office, which serves the buyers with screenings or print-outs of
the design. Before the sun sets over the Midlands, Tootal may be able to
confirm an order for thousands of metres of fabric from Japan. And when
it arrives, the fabric will look so much like the paper copy from the printer
that few people can tell the difference between the two from more than a
metre away.

According to Halliwell, computerisation of design means that Tootal
can respond to the whims of fashion in weeks, rather than months. When a
particular style does well, the firm can create dozens of similar designs
and rush them into production while buyers are still interested.

Not all the companies that are investing in computer design are huge
firms with hundreds of thousands of pounds to spend. Al and Pat Reid work
with two other people, who are together known as the Harry Rubens Studio,
out of an apartment in Manhattan’s Chelsea district. The quartet spent almost
$30 000 on an AVL system that includes a personal computer, two colour monitors,
a colour scanner and a colour printer.

The Reids create designs, which they print and sell. Garment designers
and manufacturers come to them and ask for three bold stripes, four plaids
and a floral print, all using the same palette of colours and all having
a similar style, or ‘feel’. When customers bring samples of fabric that
they like, Pat uses the scanner to transfer the pattern to the computer.
The scanner flashes beams of red, green and blue light, in sequence, at
the sample. It measures the intensity of colour a line at a time across
the fabric and converts the measurements into digital signals. These are
transferred to the computer, which later reconstitutes them as an image
on its screen with a resolution of up to 300 dots per inch. Within 60 seconds,
the fabric is on the screen, and the Reids go to work. They broaden a stripe,
shrink a block of solid colour, change a brown background to green, and
increase the frequency with which the plaid’s basic pattern is repeated.
In two hours, Pat can produce a dozen designs; each one is ‘new’ and yet
each one has the feel of the original sample. And according to copyright
law in the US, customers who change a pattern by at least 20 per cent have
created a new one, which they own – no matter who produced the original
sample.

While AVL began as a company that made looms, and added computer design
to make weaving on them more flexible, another firm now heavily involved
in modern textile design has always been a computer company. Computer Design,
formerly known as CDI, was founded 13 years ago to operate in the burgeoning
field of computer-aided design. While AVL designs its systems around consumer
items, such as personal computers, Computer Design goes for graphic workstations,
which have faster processors, more memory and additional circuitry for displaying
the complicated patterns needed to design textiles. A designer buying a
Computer Design system may spend around $180 000, against as little as $26
000 for one from AVL, to get its software running on a workstation with
a large colour monitor that produces images in great detail; the monitor
has such a high resolution that it can show the individual threads of a
fabric. The Computer Design system includes a $75 000 printer; the printer
in the AVL package costs $5000.

Textile designers work with two monitors, both connected to the same
computer. The smaller, low-resolution monitor displays the options available
for creating a new design; the large, high-resolution monitor displays the
fabric as it is designed. Designers use a ‘mouse’ to indicate to the computer
the data they want to transfer from one monitor to the other. (The mouse
is a tabletop device that moves an arrow on the screen just as a keyboard
moves a cursor.) The mouse is also the modern designer’s only instrument.
Designers use it to draw a skirt, for instance, on screen and then click
a button on the mouse to indicate to the computer that the skirt is ready
to accept fabric. They click the button twice to move to the small monitor,
where they run the arrow down the list of available designs and, with another
click, select a red and yellow plaid or some other design that is stored
in the computer. Two more clicks bring the arrow back to the large monitor
and the sketch of the skirt, where another click ‘applies’ the red and yellow
plaid to the skirt. In less than a second, the skirt can be displayed in
any pattern of fabric stored in the computer.

Alternatively, a garment designer can sketch a model wearing a long,
pleated skirt and a jacket over a blouse, then transfer the sketch to the
computer using the scanner. Working with a mouse, the designer then outlines
each piece or element of the design: the sleeves, the front, the collar
of the jacket, the flat areas and each pleat or fold in the skirt. Then
with a few clicks of the mouse, the designer can colour the jacket solid
navy and weave a plaid skirt. In a few seconds, the computer simulates draping
and shadowing to create a realistic image of the result. The image is not
‘flat’; stripes widen as they go over bulges to give the effect of three
dimensions. Garment designers no longer have to imagine how a particular
fabric would look in one of their creations; they can view their ideas on
a computer screen and hand round a print-out.

The extra power of the Computer Design system makes the process faster:
creating a design with AVL programs and equipment may require dozens of
transitions, using the computer’s mouse, between the main and secondary
monitors, and the final design may take up to 15 seconds to appear on the
main monitor.

Computer Design has created a series of programs that enable a designer
to control every step of the design from the choice of yarn that is woven
into a piece of cloth to the way a garment made from the fabric will look
on a model. In the yarn design stage, a circle appears on the screen to
represent the yarn seen end-on; designers select individual fibres, in any
of the 16.7 million colours in the program’s palette, and add them to the
yarn. They then choose how to spin the yarn and the tightness of the twist.
When satisfied, they can view the yarn in three thicknesses, as it would
look from above. If they want to have a soft, brushed surface, or nap –
as with the fuzzy acrylic sweaters – they can blur the image on screen so
that the yarn looks fuzzy. Then, with just a couple of keystrokes, or mouse-clicks,
the designers choose a sample weave and fill the screen with fabric woven
from the yarn.

The sections of the program that control the design of woven and printed
fabric produced by Computer Design are very much like AVL’s, and let the
designers experiment endlessly with colours, patterns and repeated elements.
If designers like an element from a fabric design that is already in the
computer, they can copy the element, a rosette in a floral print for instance,
into their new design. Colours can be changed, made lighter or darker, and
their density, or richness, varied from pastel to fully saturated.

According to Simon Poulton, who demonstrates Computer Design software
to garment designers in a showroom in the centre of Manhattan’s garment
district, textile design is not necessarily faster and cheaper than it used
to be. The computer systems simply allow designers to experiment more to
produce the designs they want.

The downside for designers is that garment makers have become more demanding.
Manufacturers often decide that a fabric design is not quite right and that
a little tinkering with the pattern, a slight variation in the colours,
might put things right. In the past, designers could say that they did not
have time to make more changes; a design was either approved, reluctantly,
or filed away. Now there is always time to create ten more designs if necessary.

* * *

Colourful impressions from a printer’s palette

WHEN Tootal Fabrics, the British garment manufacturer based in Manchester,
sends a shirting design to Japan or London, it must be confident that the
image that emerges from the printer hundreds or thousands of kilometres
away will be identical to the one delivered by the printer in its own design
office.

The printer that Tootal has chosen to do the job uses dye sublimation,
in which a hot printing head transfers impressions through a dye ribbon
onto paper. The head has 3584 separate heating elements, each of which can
be warmed to any one of 256 arbitrary levels. The heat causes dye in the
ribbon to sublimate, or turn into gas. This enables the dye to react with
the coating on the paper to create an image; the hotter an element, the
more dye that is transferred into the coating. The ribbon has four different
segments – yellow, magenta, cyan and black – each the size of the image
to be printed. Four impressions in yellow, magenta, cyan and black are built
up in sequence to produce an image. Overall, the printer has a palette of
16.7 million colours and shades.

The Du Pont 4CAST printer, developed by Dai Nippon Printing, has been
on sale outside Japan since 1988. Most of the machines have gone to advertising
agencies, magazine art directors and printers, who relish the chance to
see, in just a few minutes, what their colour artwork will look like before
going to press. It takes 5 minutes to print an image at A4 size, and about
7 minutes for an A3 picture.

The printer has been slow to catch on in the textile market, partly
because of its high cost, and partly because, until recently, it used only
high-gloss paper, which suits the graphics designers of ‘glossy’ brochures.
Glossy images are fine for men’s shirtings, but they do not reproduce woollens
or upholstery fabrics well. Du Pont is now introducing a matt finish paper
that will more closely match a large variety of textiles. But no paper will
ever be able to give a realistic represen tation of the surface texture
of a nubbly jumper, or of a corduroy.

Jonathan Beard is a freelance writer based in New York City.