Future fashion: high-tech haute couture

Nonwovens Industry, Dec, 2008 by Efrat Tseelon

Contemporary fashion is a space where contrary trends are being played out. A globalized market that is customerled has placed value on customization and personalized creative expression as much as on the standardization of high street fashion. While catwalk fashion and street fashion are walking side by side, lifestyle retail (fashion included) has been replacing the sales "act" with the shopping "experience" marked by dynamism and excitement, innovation and creativity.

Nonwovens are new players in the world of fashion design. Traditionally involved in the apparel industry for interlinings, clothing accessories, insulation and shoe components, they are making their first steps in moving from invisible to visible spheres. The shift from function to aesthetics is a result of recent advances in fabric engineering that have produced truly engineered materials with technical performance properties. With characteristics varying from better drape, durability, stretch and recovery, improved fit, high or low thermal protection, to color-change materials, impact, cut or slash resistance, water resistance or absorbency, nonwoven fabrics open creative and aesthetic possibilities for non-functional fashion design.

Fashion by its essence captures the mood of a passing moment. Yet this nonwoven collection embodies what the Milan-based Future Concepts Lab has defined as "the real fashion trend" of the last decade and the present moment. The collection combines the trend for the style that derives inspiration from nostalgia and the trend that involves an "experimental lab" of artificial aesthetic and technical materials; it combines the creative challenge of rules with layering of different referencing systems; it combines emphasis on details with unexpected richness of creative surfaces and contrasts. Finally, it combines simplicity with new understated luxury that reflects uniqueness and innovation.

The apparel category is ripe for innovation. What we are seeing now is the beginning of an evolution when a new generation of fabrics with enhanced capacities is being discovered by fashion. The School of Design at the University of Leeds has pioneered the exclusive use of smart nonwoven materials in a fashion collection. When a super new technology is added to an ancient medium like textiles, there is a need for exploration of its history and respect of its traditions. The synergy between the textile heritage and technological advances has resulted in creative solutions and in new interpretation (action) of traditional ingredients (function). Thus, this collection is aptly called: Fashion: Function in Action

By Efrat Tseelon, PhD, Chair of Fashion Theory

School of Design, University of Leeds, UK