It is difficult to keep pace with the ever-changing trends of the fashion world. What’s “in” one minute is often out of trend the next season, potentially causing you to reevaluate your wardrobe.
However, keeping up with the latest fashion styles can be wasteful and expensive. Approximately 92 million tons of textile waste is generated annually, which includes the clothes we discard when they are out of style or no longer fit. But what if we could reassemble our clothes and shape them into the outfits we want, adapting to trends and the way our bodies change?
A team of researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Adobe are attempting to bring eco-friendly, versatile apparel to life. Their new “refashion” software system breaks fashion design into modules – essentially, smaller building blocks – by allowing users to draw, plan and visualize each element of a clothing item. The tool turns fashion ideas into a blueprint that outlines how to assemble each component into reconfigurable clothing, such as a pair of pants that can be transformed into a dress.
With Refashion, users easily create shapes and put them together to develop outlines of customizable fashion pieces. This is a visual diagram that shows how clothing is cut, providing a straightforward way to design things like shirts with attached hoods for rainy days. One can also create a skirt that can be reconfigured into a dress for a formal dinner or a maternity dress that fits during different stages of pregnancy.
“We wanted to create garments that considered re-use from the beginning,” says Rebecca Lynn, a PhD student in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), a CSAIL and Media Lab researcher, and lead author of a paper presenting the project. “Most of the clothes you buy today are static, and are discarded when you no longer want them. Refashion instead makes the most of our garments by helping us design items that can be easily resized, repaired, or re-styled into different outfits.”
module à la mode
The researchers conducted a pilot user study where both designers and novices explored refashion and were able to create apparel prototypes. Participants assembled pieces such as asymmetric tops that could be extended into a jumpsuit, or made into a formal dress, often within 30 minutes. These results suggest that refashion has the potential to make prototyping garments more accessible and efficient. But what features can contribute to this ease of use?
Its interface first presents a simple grid in its “Pattern Editor” mode, where users can connect points to outline the boundaries of a fabric object. This is essentially creating rectangular panels and specifying how the various modules will connect to each other.
Users can customize the size of each component, create a straightforward design for the clothing (which can be useful for less form-fitting items like chinos) or perhaps tinker with one of Refashion’s templates. The user can edit pre-designed blueprints for things like t-shirts, fitted blouses or trousers.
Another, more creative route is to change the design of individual modules. For starters, the “pleat” feature can be selected to fold a garment over itself, similar to an accordion. This is a useful way to design something like a maxi dress. The “Gather” option adds an artistic flourish, where a garment is folded together to create a puffy skirt or sleeves. A user can also use a “dart” module, which removes a triangular piece from the fabric. This allows a garment to be shaped at the waist (perhaps for a pencil skirt) or the upper part of the body (for example a fitted shirt).
While it may seem like each of these components needs to be sewn together, refashion enables users to combine clothing through more flexible, efficient means. The edges can be joined together via two-sided connectors such as metal snaps (like the buttons used to close a denim jacket) or Velcro dots. The user can also fasten them to a pin called a brad, which has a pointed part that allows them to stick into a hole and split into two “legs” to attach to another surface; This is an easy way to secure an image to a poster board. Both connection methods make it easy to reconfigure modules, whether they are damaged or need a new look for a “fit check”.
As a user designs their clothing piece, the system automatically creates a simplified diagram of how it can be assembled. The pattern is divided into numbered blocks, which are drawn on different parts of the 2D mannequin to specify the position of each component. The user can then simulate how their sustainable clothing will look on 3D models of different body types (one can even upload a model).
Finally, a digital blueprint for sustainable clothing can expand, shrink, or combine with other pieces. Thanks to refashion, a new piece can symbolize a possible change in fashion: instead of buying new clothes every time we want a new outfit, we can simply reconfigure existing clothes. Yesterday’s scarf could be today’s hat, and today’s t-shirt could be tomorrow’s jacket.
“Rebecca’s work is at an exciting intersection between computation and art, craft, and design,” says Eric Demaine, an MIT EECS professor and CSAIL principal investigator who advised Lin. “I’m excited to see how refashion can make custom fashion designs accessible to the wearer, while also making clothing more reusable and sustainable.”
constant change
While refashion offers a green vision for the future of fashion, researchers say they are actively improving the system. They intend to modify the interface to support more sustainable items, moving beyond standard prototyping clothing. The refashion may also soon support other modules like curved panels. The CSAIL-Adobe team could also evaluate whether their system could use as few materials as possible to reduce waste, and whether it could help “remix” older store-bought outfits.
Lin also plans to develop new computational tools that will help designers create unique, personalized costumes using colors and textures. She’s exploring how to design clothing by patchwork – essentially, cutting small pieces from materials like decorative fabric, recycled denim and crochet blocks and assembling them into a larger item.
“This is a great example of how computer-aided design can also be important in supporting more sustainable practices in the fashion industry,” says Adrien Bosseau, a senior researcher at the University Côte d’Azur’s Inaria Center who was not involved in the paper. “By promoting garment transformation from the beginning, they have developed a new design interface and accompanying customization algorithm that helps designers create garments that can undergo longer lifespans through reconfiguration. While sustainability often places additional constraints on industrial production, I am confident that the research conducted by Lin and his colleagues will empower designers to innovate despite these constraints.”
Lin co-wrote the paper with Adobe Research scientists Michelle Lucas and Mackenzie Leake, who is the paper’s senior author and a former CSAIL postdoc. Their work was partially supported by the MIT Morningside Academy for Design, the MIT Make Design-2-Making Mini-Grant, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. The researchers recently presented their work at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.
