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Fabrics

Without fabric there would be no garment. You could have the best design in the world, but without fabric it can’t be realized. Making a judgment call on which fabrics to use and for which garment is a skill, and it is one that can be learnt through experience in the workplace. For example, look at the clothes in your wardrobe. Take a cotton shirt and imagine what it would be like in a heavy wool fabric. Take a silk dress and imagine it in denim. Both the dress and shirt would still be wearable, but would probably be suitable for different occasions. Understanding which fabric is used for what style and why, is part of the skill of the developer.

FABRIC CHARACTERISTICS

There are thousands of different fabrics used, but for a starting point I will break them down into four categories: knitted fabrics, woven fabric, bonded/non-woven fabrics, and yarns.

COMPOSITION

The composition of the fabric is the mix of different yarns it is made from. It can be split into two sections, the first is natural fibres (cotton, linen, wool and silk), and the second is synthetic or artificial fibres (e.g. viscose, modal, polyester, nylon). Some fabrics are made of a single fibre, and some are blends of two or more fibres. The composition of the fabric affects the performance of the fabric in its end use. For instance, a shirt in 100% cotton will probably be creased when it is washed and will need to be ironed. The same shirt in 50% cotton 50% polyester probably won’t need to be ironed, as the long fibres of the polyester yarn help to keep the fabric flatter.

CONSTRUCTION

The construction of a fabric refers to how it is made. Some are woven, some are knitted and some are bonded. Under these headings the categories can be broken down into different weaves and knitting techniques. Here are some examples of the types of weaves and fabrics and their suitability for specific garments and product groups.

WOVEN

A woven fabric is constructed by weaving a warp and a weft thread together. The warp threads run along the length of the fabric and the weft from side to side. At the edge of the fabric on each side is the selvedge. Woven fabrics can made from both natural and synthetic fibres and can be used for shirts, coats, jackets, dresses, pants and skirts. The three basic weave constructions are plain, twill and satin.

BONDED OR NON-WOVEN

Bonded fabrics are constructed by sealing together synthetic fibres by heat or adhesive. They are not as strong as woven fabrics, but can be used for interlinings for garments or in felted fabric, which can be used for hats or slippers.

JERSEY KNIT

Jersey knit is a knitted fabric, and is used for T-shirts or any lightweight knitted garments. Most jersey is made on a circular knitting machine, which means it is knitted in a seamless loop. Jersey knit doesn’t have to be in cotton; it can be in a variety of yarns. Common jersey qualities are: single jersey, double jersey or interlock.

SWEATER YARN

Sweater yarns are also knitted into garments, but here they describe sweaters rather than T-shirts. Sweater yarns can be of natural, synthetic or metallic origin, and are usually knitted up on a loom rather than on a circular knitting machine. The thickness of the yarn is indicated by its gauge, and this is indicated as ‘gg’. A yarn for a hand-knit piece will have a low gauge of 3gg, whereas a very lightweight or fine gauge knit would be in 16-18gg. The number of the gauge refers to the number of rows to an inch, so the lower the number the thicker the yarn.

TIMINGS

The selection of the fabric begins when the concept is created. The designer will have some fabric ideas from the concept, which can be as vague as ‘printed silk’, or a ‘textured wool’. At the same time as the developer is working with the sketches and the range plan, she is also working alongside the designer on the fabric selection. The designer has a clear idea about which fabrics should be used, but at this stage they are not yet finalised. Once the design process is underway, these ideas will start to become more specific, with a firmer view of the silk being a crepe, or the wool being a bouclé, and from there the selection goes one step deeper into different weights of fabric and different compositions that may be required. Maybe the silk will be a cotton silk mix, whereas the wool may be mixed with cashmere.

PLACES TO SELECT FABRICS

FABRICS FAIRS

Fabric fairs are the best places to source and select new fabrics and yarns, but what happens at the fairs, who works there and how does the fabric selection process work? Fabric mills show their collections at the fabric fairs twice a year, either directly or via agents, to designers, developers, and fabric buyers. Examples of some European fabric fairs are Première Vision (pv) in Paris, Munich Fabric Start in Germany or Milano Unica in Milan. But there are also many fairs in Asia and the usa. There is also a specific yarn fair in Florence.

FABRIC AGENTS

Agents are the middlemen between the fabric mill and the brand, with many being linked to more than one mill; they earn their money from linking the right mill with the right customer. An advantage of using a fabric agent is that if they work with more than mill, you are able to see multiple collections in one appointment.

FABRIC MILLS

Fabric mills come in all shapes and sizes. Some are huge, covering many different types of fabrics (wools, linens, cottons and synthetics) and some specialise in one specific fabric type. Each mill will have a range relevant to the oncoming season, and their job is to entice the visitor into ordering a header card or colour card. The secrecy around the fabrics is due to the possibility of having fabric ideas stolen. The mills are very protective of their fabrics, and it is common for them not to allow you on their exhibition stand unless you have an appointment with the agent or with the mill directly.

FABRIC DYEING

There are four main ways of buying fabric: as a yarn dye, piece dye, a printed fabric or greige. Understanding the differences will help you make informed fabric selections during the development stages.

YARN DYE

A yarn dye fabric is one which could be either a stripe, check or all over pattern, and whose colours are usually selected by the brand at yarn level. They will select colours from the yarn mill’s colour card and will ask the fabric mill to make a hand loom for approval by the developer and the designer.

PIECE DYE

Piece dyed fabric is dyed after weaving, and is the most common of the techniques. The design team will either make a colour selection from the mill’s colour card, or will submit its own shades for lab dipping.

PRINTED FABRIC

Some fabric mills have collections of fabric prints, which can be used as the header or recoloured to fit the brand’s collection. It is also possible to have your own design printed by a fabric mill for something completely unique. In this case the mill will take the artwork from the brand, make a ‘strike off’ and send it to the designer or developer for approval. Once approved, the mill will weave up the fabric and send it to the garment factory.

GREIGE

Greige fabric is un-dyed, unfinished fabric, and is often ordered by brands when they are not yet in a position to select colours. They need to secure the fabric whilst the proto is being made in an available colour, but perhaps prefer to wait until the proto review to finalise shades. If they were to wait until the 1st garment review to book the fabric they might be too late. This is when greige is booked. Once the greige is booked, it undergoes a finishing process which makes it ‘ready to dye’ which makes it ready for either use in piece dye or garment dye.

GARMENT DYE

Garment dyeing is a method of fabric dyeing after it has been made into a garment. If a brand wants to have a garment that looks used or vintage, it will make the garment in a ready to dye fabric and submerge it in a vat of dye complete with its buttons, labels and thread. The whole garment comes out coloured if a little uneven in its shading. Brands, such as Pepe Jeans, and Abercrombie and Fitch, use garment dyes for some of their designs.

SELECTING FABRICS

If I’m selecting fabric for a designer or for a collection, I would make my research on the styles of garments the collection has, the price indications for the styles, and the ideas from the designer on the fabric types. I would draw up a short list of fabric mills and would make appointments to look at their collections to make selections against my list of requirements. From these selections I would order header cards.

SEASONAL CONSIDERATIONS

One point to make here is that depending on your final market (customer) you may need to have a good selection of all types and weights of fabrics. If you are based in Europe, but also sell to stores in Australia, you will need to incorporate a broader selection of fabric weights to accommodate the opposite seasons or climate. If it is a Spring range, the fabric weights will be lightweight, while in a Fall season the weights will be heavier (of course it is a little more complicated than that, but for the sake of simplicity let’s keep it as this).

HEADER CARDS

This is a square of fabric (that can be up to 30cm x 30cm) with its technical details written on the top for reference. This will include the reference code for the fabric, the price, the colour reference number, the weight per m2, the width and composition (100% wool, or 70% wool 30% cashmere, etc.). The designer orders headers like this from various mills to review them around 2 weeks later.

REVIEWING THE FABRICS

The review of the fabrics goes in three stages:

> According to fabric type

Once I had received all the header cards from the mills I would split them up into fabric types, e.g. wool, silk, cotton, so that I had a clear spread of qualities.

> According to construction and weight

From here I would subdivide the piles of header cards further into weave and weight, so all the satins, twills, bouclés, poplins, drills, denims, meltons, crepes and canvas were separate; this way I would have clearer comparison in order to make a better decision.

> According to price

Finally, I would make a note of the price on top of each of the header cards; this is a very important factor in the decision making process, as the fabric price accounts for a high percentage of the cost price of the garment and has a major influence on the profit margin of the style.

MINIMUM ORDER CONSIDERATIONS

Every fabric mill has ‘minimum order’ quantities that it attaches to fabrics for sampling and also for production. The reason why minimums are set is as follows: to set up the machines to weave 1 m of the fabric is the same amount of effort as for 50 m, but there is more profit in 50 m than in 1 m. So, with this in mind the mill sets minimums accordingly. Sampling fabric is the term used for the quantity of fabric ordered for prototypes or salesman (selling samples). The minimums set by the fabric mills can either be per colour or per fabric article (this is an important fact to check at the fabric selection stage).

PER COLOUR

Fabric minimums per colour means you have to sell a lot of garments in one particular colour to meet fabric minimums, which is ok if the fabric is white, black or navy, but not so easy if it is yellow, pink or green. For instance, a men’s shirt is made in green cotton poplin. The production minimums for this fabric are 500 m per colour. This means that you have to sell around 250 pieces of that shirt to meet the minimum order quantity. Depending on the shade of green, this could be easy or hard to achieve. It would be better if the minimums were around 100 m per colour, so that the brand would only have to sell around 50 pieces of the shirt to meet the minimums. A fabric with minimums of 500 m of a colour would not be a great choice in this example.

PER FABRIC ARTICLE

Fabric minimums per fabric article is much easier to work with for a brand, and this requirement means that it could be possible to have several colours of a fabric at lower quantities each and still be able to meet minimums. For instance, a wool bouclé fabric has production minimums of 1000 m per fabric. The fabric will be used for a jacket in four colours, which will equate to around 100 pieces of each jacket in each colour to reach the minimum. This is a great result, and it would be a great fabric for the developer to select and show the designer.

For sampling, where a small amount of fabric is needed for prototypes or for a set of salesman samples, the fabric minimum from the fabric mill is usually 50 m, but for production the quantities are much higher. In the production stage the fabric mills will quote anything from 100 to 1000 m minimums. There are, of course, exceptions depending on what size of fabric mill you work with. The large mills in Asia, which are used to working with huge international companies, have very high minimum quantities and have less flexibility for smaller brands than the small Italian mills who have much more flexibility because they are used to working on smaller orders. The important point that needs to be understood is that most fabric mills will accommodate your sampling requests because they want to get production orders from you, as this is how they make their profit.

ALLOCATING FABRICS

The developer works closely with the designer to allocate the right fabrics to the designs, making sure that the weight, price and type of the fabric is both suitable for the garment’s construction and is alsoin line with the designer’s vision. Having a wide range of prices and styles of fabrics to choose from makes the allocation easier, but it is essential to understand what the designer wants from and for the garment.

THE RANGE PLAN AND ITS CONSEQUENCES TO FABRICS

The pyramid of basic, mid and top styles has already been introduced in the chapter on range planning, but for the sake of the fabric selection I will explain more about how the fabric prices affect the styles’ position. Understanding where the style is in the pyramid will help you to select a fabric that is suitable for price.

FABRIC PRICING

Quite simply, if the style is a basic level shirt with a low retail selling price, the cost of the fabric needs to be low also, so that the brand will have a good profit margin. At the top of the pyramid there are the high fashion styles with a high retail price. These styles (although this is not imperative) can have a higher priced, more exclusive fabric, as they need to be visually rich and impressive enough to entice the consumer. The brand will still want to make profit on these styles, so it is not an excuse to go crazy at a fabric fair, but there is certainly some leeway allowed.

ALLOCATING COLOUR

It has already been explained that colour is one of the four factors in the concept, and it is at this stage of the development process that the designer and the developer begin to consider the colours for each style and how the shades work with the proposed fabric selections.

STYLES AND OPTIONS

When allocating the colours to the fabrics, it is important to note that some of the styles will be made in more than one colour. The term for this is an ‘option’. A style is a single item of clothing, such as a jacket or a skirt, and an option is a colour way, wash or finish of a style. So, for instance, if a jacket is made in three colours, it is one style in three options.

COLOUR CARDS

Most fabric mills and yarn suppliers have colour cards for their products, which the fabric mill collates for each fabric and yarn reference, and is based on trend predictions and their own history of sales. Some colours, such as black, navy, ivory and grey, sell consistently well season on season, so these will always be on the shade card. Trend or seasonal colours, on the other hand, like yellow, green or pink would be seen as the ‘seasonal’ highlight colours of the fabric collection, and would be relevant for the season, but would be changed six months later. With the mills and the designers working from similar trends, their colour ideas often match. When the designer and developer begin the selecting colours, they try, wherever possible, to select from the mill’s card, as this is a cheaper and quicker approach. If the desired colour is not available, the developer will ask the fabric mill to make a ‘lab dip’ of the brand’s colour, but on the mill’s fabric.

LAB DIPS

The process of lab dipping is more time consuming and more expensive, but ensures that the shade the designer selects remains consistent throughout the collection. It is a process that happens at both the development stage and production stage, whereby a colour lab (which works with the fabric mill) makes up the designer’s shade in a chosen fabric by mixing a series of basic dyes. They then submit an offer to the designer in three or more versions of the colour, including one that is closest to what the designer originally wanted. In some cases the designer will give some comments and direction to improve the colour. The lab notes these comments, the colour mixture is changed and new lab dips are submitted. This process continues until the designer gives the final approval.

HANDLOOMS

If the designer likes a fabric design but wants to change some of the colours of the weave, they request a ‘handloom’ to see before committing to the final fabric. A handloom is a small swatch of fabric made up on a handloom by the factory to show a particular design. It is also very common for designers to request their own handlooms from the fabric mill with their own designs. They may take colours from the fabric mill’s colour card, but ask for a checked or striped fabric to the brand’s design to be created. This makes the design more distinctive and tailored to the brand’s own collection, but can be expensive for the mills.

FABRIC LEAD TIMES