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 subsequent season, potentially causing you to re-evaluate your wardrobe.
Staying current with the most recent fashion styles may 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 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 the way to assemble each component into reconfigurable clothing, corresponding to a pair of pants that may 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 the way to cut garments, providing a simple solution 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 if you not want them. Refashion as a substitute makes essentially the most of our garments by helping us design items that may 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 capable of create garment prototypes. Participants assembled pieces corresponding to an asymmetric top that might 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 hook up with one another.
Users can customize the form of every component, create a straight design for garments (which could be 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 vary the design of individual modules. One can select the “pleat” feature to fold a garment over itself, just like an accordion, for starters. It’s a useful solution 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 along 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 may appear that every of those components must be sewn together, Refashion enables users to attach garments through more flexible, efficient means. Edges may be seamed together via double-sided connectors corresponding 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 solution 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 robotically creates a simplified diagram of how it may well 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 spread of body types (one may upload a model).
Finally, a digital blueprint for sustainable clothing can extend, shorten, or mix with other pieces. Because of Refashion, a brand new piece might 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 will simply reconfigure existing ones. Yesterday’s scarf might be today’s hat, and today’s T-shirt might 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 longer term 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 may evaluate whether their system can use as few materials as possible to reduce waste, and whether it may well 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 the way 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 awesome example of how computer-aided design can 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, partly, 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.
