I interviewed these guys for an article on the use of seaweed in yarn and fabric. And I bought the 3D knit seaweed sweater. Great team, with a lot of heart and good intentions.
I'm also a hand knitter, and I don't really see any conflict between what they're doing and hand knitting. The grist of the yarn that you use as a hand knitter is generally much thicker than these machines commonly use. Commercial 3D knitting machines can do all of the stretchy, thin, and light stuff that the modern wardrobe is built around.
As folks note, this technology was really pioneered by Shimaseki's work in Japan just decades ago. What OC and the similar Brooklyn-based Tailored Industry are really innovating on is the business model and connection to production process. Folks like this are really serious about not producing all of the waste that comes with most fashion production processes, and it shows up at several levels of the stack.
For the HN crowd, TI's platform gives you more of a sense of why this sort of tech is really like the cloud for knitwear: https://tailoredindustry.com/platform
Really a fascinating part of the global fashion production world, and one we would all benefit from seeing grow.
I have a small sweater line I’m looking at doing in china right now but I have a long lasting fascination with the shima seki machines. If you were doing a short fashion run would TI be appropriate? How does one get their preferred yarn over to someone like TI?
They definitely are a powerful option for smaller scale runs. Very much optimized to have the unit economics and turnaround time work for smaller brands.
I don't really know the answer around supplying your own yarn. I'd assume that's the abnormal case, but just a guess.
They pitch this as the panacea to fast fashion, but surely the solution to fast fashion is just to not buy and throw away so many clothes? I don't believe we buy cheap clothes because we can't find good quality clothes that last, but because we like owning lots of clothes and keeping up with trends. When my last laptop broke I was kind of happy. I thought "ooh now I can upgrade to a shiny new laptop guilt-free". I think that's the real problem.
I bought a 200 dollar jacket and it had holes in it within months, just from regular use. I have an old 3 dollar shirt I bought years ago and it's only now beginning to show wear.
One problem this shows, is that as a consumer I have no idea what the hell is quality clothing. Clearly, expensive does not always mean high quality. And I'm not buying "brand" clothing either.
Another problem is the dive to the bottom that the industry has suffered.
Your experience is very common, I have a fake nike sweatshirt I bought more than a decade ago from a random street seller (emergency on a trip) which still outlasts current brand clothes.
Consumers' ignorance is not the problem, it used to be generally true that the more expensive item was better. Every brand has seemingly decided to burn their furniture to heat the house though, and what we experience is not as much consumer ignorance as it is a lack of names deserving trust.
Buy second hand clothes. These are either very, very, cheap, and they last just long enough for me to get bored with them. Or they are merely fairly cheap and last almost forever because the stuff that quickly falls apart doesn't get resold, it gets discarded by the person who bought it new.
In either case I have lengthened the time between manufacturing and landfill and had the enjoyment of clothes that I would otherwise not have been able to afford along the way.
I think my parents knew this. I grew up with second hand clothes almost exclusively and didn't really know until I asked my parents about it when I was older. It is a great strat to find quality clothes.
I tried to be a good boy and wrote to the company asking for zipper parts to fix it and they told me to buy another jacket.
So I looked for companies that advertise repairability and found Patagonia made the most believable claims. Quite reasonable now that I'm old and rich, but I wouldn't have had the choice when young and poor.
I've started buying "nicer" things purely for fit reasons, like I've realized that I'm a lean 6' guy with a long torso, so for shirts and especially sweaters a medium is too short and a large is too baggy— the correct size for me in off-the-rack items is a tall medium, and that's definitely not available everywhere.
So I'm extremely happy with a Land's End quarter zip that I picked up recently, and I hope that's a well-made piece that will last a while, but overall I completely agree that mass-produced clothing is a market for lemons; no one can tell what the good stuff is, so it's all assumed to be garbage and priced accordingly.
A “quality” jacket in the 1930s would cost 300-400$ or more inflation adjusted, it would also look less fashionable today, and feel somewhat less comfortable due to several concessions for durability in design. A durable quality jacket back then was also holding a majority market position, rather than being a niche good, which means that “quality clothes” do still seem to exist, but I’m always looking at 500-600$ for durable jeans or coats.
>but I’m always looking at 500-600$ for durable jeans
tf.
That’s clearly you looking for a specific fashion or intending to pay as much as you can.
Triple Aught Design jeans are $150 to $250 and I am skeptical you have anything that is outlasting them. Others brands surely as well. Seems to me you are still stuck in the “if it costs more…” line of thinking.
having burned though easily 10 pairs of Triple Aught pants of various designs, they are well made and attractive, but durability is not an outlier from my experience. each design consistently fails in the same area with regular use. i tend to repurchase the designs that fit and function well, but they all inevitably fall.
I recently ordered some Levis that I'm happy with, but I think there's also a limit for me in that certain life-things can happen that will end a garment regardless of how much was paid for it or how much it was babied.
I'm pretty disciplined about wearing a bib in the kitchen these days, but you can still get a glass of wine on it at the dinner table, or sparks from a campfire, or a cycling wipeout. Those are annoying at the best of times, but particularly if it ends a garment that you paid 3-5x normal price for specifically so you could have it forever.
No, I am just buying import Japanese jeans from the folk that bought all of the original high quality jeans making machines when the Americans moved to the flexi stuff, the jeans I buy last with next to no damage for 10-15 years despite near daily wear.
I will grant you that I am paying a premium for both import, and a particular quality of fabric, but honestly I look like farmer Joe mostly.
Yep :/ There are just no good heuristics left for quality clothing. It's horrible. One thing I do genuinely have good experience with is Japanese denim. But that's about it.
I've been trying to buy winter coats at end of season (coincidentally; not chasing sales), and one thing is consistent: fabric content is only hinted at. "Full wool" but "slightly stretchy" - possible with a broadcloth woven wool, but more likely "full"!=100%. "Cashmere" at prices that can (at best) be 10% cashmere, but might be 2% just to avoid outright fraud.
I bought a really good-looking dark blue fedora; I received a really good-looking black fedora a size-and-a-1/2 too big. I had to fight them at the credit card level, because they offered me half off at best for a hat I can't wear.
What is inconsistent: only some of them are fraudulent fronts. I'd guess about 25-50% right now, based on my recent shopping experiences. But not all: I ordered some expensive gloves; their advertised fit was wrong; we settled on 50% off (I /can/ wear them, but it's not ideal, and their return policy clearly required me to ship back). That firm had shite measurement guides, but honest merchant fronting.
I've ordered super-cool button-front shirts that ended up being tissue-like fabric. Grrr...
Speaking of fabric... Amazon folded Fabric.com into their Borg cube, and you CANNOT buy fabric by weight online - for some goddamn reason. I want to buy 100% white cotton for a play costume, and need it thicker - between sheeting and terrycloth; closer to the latter; Nothing else really matters to me about it. But can I determine the cloth thickness/weight? Nope.
So: 50% swindlers; 75% idiots; buy clothes in person or else expect to throw a certain amount away.
In Europe if a garment says 100% New Wool it had better be just that. I have several coats with varying proportions of wool, nylon, etc. All bought secondhand and of very high quality compared to the price I paid.
Of course they aren't the latest fashion but clothes that last are by definition out of fashion for most of their existence.
As I understand it, a big part of produced clothing just goes straight to waste to begin with. If everything was created on-demand, it would minimize that kind of waste.
> As I understand it, a big part of produced clothing just goes straight to waste to begin with.
My niece runs a business that relies on the way we discard clothes. She buys clothes from suppliers in India who source them from the bales of discarded clothes sent to them from Europe. Her suppliers have in effect sorted through the mountain of discards to find the ones that have sufficient value to sell back to us. She specifically buys clothes that have 'vintage' appeal (think tailored jackets rather than hoodies) and sells them primarily to students in a northern English city. Her business has done well enough to move from market stalls to a dedicated high street store and she is just branching out into 'vintage' kids clothes.
That would be great, a lot of clothes are made at sizes that don't sell very well and which get discounted, then discarded if they don't sell.
However, made on demand will likely cost more, plus you can't fit items first. Unless they make items for fitting which you can then order to have manufactured.
But yeah the main thing is that on-demand can never compete with mass production even if a big part of the mass produced stuff is discarded.
> on-demand can never compete with mass production even if a big part of the mass produced stuff is discarded.
This is definitely not universally true. E.g. photos are very cheaply printed on demand. Even on-demand books are printed at reasonable prices. Sure, mass production is cheaper (both for books and pictures), but the value difference of the individual product is high enough to bridge the price gap.
For cloth this area has found little exploration. TFA covers production at niche scale. If you would mass produce the looms to reduce the capital expense and heavily lean into customer value, e.g. individual fittings via 3d scans, as my sister comment proposes, or even just letting me customize my sweater with motive, color choice, garment etc., this could radically change the cost to value ratio. The company that has published TFA sells extremely bland apparel in a shop that looks just like any mass produced clothing shop and leaves all of the customer value of custom production on the table.
Last but not least: This "3d knitting" seems to need only a fraction of the labor of traditional sewed clothes. If textile production didn't default to underpaid labor under precarious working conditions in low income countries, it would probably already be cheaper.
From 3d printed clothing, the obvious next step should be to have your phone take a 3d scan of you, and send it to the clothing designer to print it to your actual body size and shape. We could have truly unique sizing (none of this S/M/L/XL stuff)!
Edge case: people who are in the process of changing their body size/shape. Growing children, people losing weight, people gaining weight (they're out there), will all occasionally want to buy for where their body is going to be in the future, not where it is now. How to accommodate them?
I'm sure models predicting how their body changes (based on various parameters and previous scans of the particular person and other people) could be built, allowing to optimize for longest time period of "decent fit" at the cost of "perfect fit now".
Yes, and people have been chasing that Grail for decades. It's always right around the corner. (Despite what another poster said, it IS being pursued commercially. And unobtainable so far.)
> I don't believe we buy cheap clothes because we can't find good quality clothes that last, but because we like owning lots of clothes and keeping up with trends.
I will buy 5 things that last for 10 years if somebody gave me the option. Otherwise no, I'm not chasing fashion trends.
If "the solution" depends on people changing their behaviour on their own (ideally by lowering their expectations/do the harder thing/etc), it is almost never "the solution". It is usually just wishful thinking.
This is an ad for a company that drop ships their product from another company that has made its business on offering production and fulfillment of canned (but customizable) 3D knit styles.
Interestingly, this potentially has applications beyond clothing.
A while back, Lee Valley did a 3D knitted chisel roll using Kevlar and other materials, in support of the Canadian company which invented the 3D knitting process used (unfortunately, at the time, I didn't have the money or need for --- I've since updated my woodworking toolkit and have a nice set of chisels which it would have been perfect for, except it was discontinued and is no longer available...)
I'm kind of in this space - 3d knitting is pretty interesting, but knitting a sweater like that takes a long time (I forget how long, but I think it's 1-2 hours), so it's not really a solution for working at any sort of scale. Unless you build up inventory or have a ton of machines. But the machines are super expensive compared to regular knitting machines.
I also think that wholegarment knits look kind of cheap and that sewing actually adds structural integrity and durability to a garment.
But anything knitting or clothes related is really fun and challenging and good for them for making a business out of it.
"I also think that wholegarment knits look kind of cheap and that sewing actually adds structural integrity and durability to a garment."
This is an ongoing discussion in the handknitting community. Knitters generally hate seaming (we're not sewers!) so the most popular patterns tend to be seamless. However, many argue that this leads to shapeless, saggy garments that aren't as wearable.
Can anyone else comment on the durability claims here - I wear a lot of knitwear but in my experience it is almost never the case that they fail at the seams. Is the cut/sew mechanism of fabrication part of the weakening? (my jumpers tent to either wear through in elbows (patchable!) or ultimately get nicked/cut by something like a branch I failed to avoid).
yeah. I was waiting for at least some kind of portal into the actual engineering and craft of the thing due to the name of the article, and was left with an advertisement flavored sour aftertaste.
Would be cool if it could also de-knit to modify clothing or reuse later. I.e if there is a hole: automatically deknit, splice in a replacement and fix it. Or if your belly growth: deknit and make that section slightly wider.
And can you use finer yarn as well, like lace? The reason a sweater is knit like it is, is because of the tradeoff between knitting time and material needed. But if labor becomes free, you should be able to knit much bigger yet more delicate stuff.
So this is an ad for company that purchased an off-the-shelf industrial knitting machine and is trying to sell it as some new novel innovation with cringe "3d knitting" branding. If you go to the the manufacturer site you can find same talking points and plenty of logos: https://www.shimaseiki.com/wholegarment/
Absolutely no relation to these guys, but I have a hobby knitwear line and a longstanding fascination with Shima Seki.
The SS machines are unique, as far as I know. They are also SUPER hard to work with -- the software is opaque. The design skills matter. Those design skills have to hook up to the SS machine design system.
Hooking yarn is not the same thing as say bending steel - in terms of reliability, ease, variations. Lots of complexity here.
There have been some attempts at doing 3d knitting direct to retail, I recall an MIT startup that had a boutique on Newbury street, and eventually went D2C only, as well as some European brands.
The SS machines are a little bit of a product in search of a market as far as I can see -- they are amazing, they waste very little product, in theory unique, custom garments can be put out rapidly. In practice, they seem to be used as small-run / custom-run tools -- but the only way to provide that is to have skilled designers and engineers -- hence the middle layer.
I think this is an uncharitable view of the information on offer. The linked page similarly brands the technique with a trademarked WHOLEGARMENT label, claiming it’s a world first, so it doesn’t seem a stretch to see how these folks got to claiming it’s novel and making a bit of a todo about how it’s different. It also seems to have some business model implications that on first approximation look less than favorable, so I think that helps to justify the need for a position paper like this.
These are not cheap machines! Looking around online, i found a lot of 4 Shima Seiki machines listed for $40k! If someone is interested getting into knitting, I would recommend starting with some cheap hand-crank machines from a brand like Sentro. You will learn a lot more, and there is a lot you can do with knit tubes. If absolutely don't want a tube, you can get a so-called panel machine. I think you can find one on Amazon or Etsy - i forget the listing i saw, but it was like $500(much less than a Shima Seiki).
But the site doesn't say anything about being new, and in fact says it was invented in 1995:
When Was 3D-Knitting Invented?
The concept of 3D-knitting was first envisioned and then developed by the
Japanese company SHIMA SEIKI. They launched their first WHOLEGARMENT knitting
machine at the ITMA trade fair in 1995.
No, the bottom of the page says they subcontract production. So it's an infomercial for a company that markets sweaters they may or may not design. And they disclose that in the article, if very subtly.
Funny that they speak so negatively about "fast fashion". If anything I would expect on-demand clothes production contribute to an _increase_ in that phenomenon, rather than the opposite.
Not at these prices :-) $150 - $200 for a sweater is not cheap. I think of fast fashion in terms of "how many times do I have to wear it to get my money's worth?" If the answer is less than the number of times I'd wear it in a year, it's fast fashion. Of course, if you're a thrift shop shopper, most fashion is fast fashion.
My grandfather wrote a scifi utopia featuring printed-on-human garments similar to this ("Fahrt nach Futuras").
So you would wake up, wash then stand on some platform and have your daily outfit knitted on you. Not sure how he worked around the risk of strangling though lol.
that's true, but there are also like 200 sock knitting machine designs for FDM printing out there , maybe they're just slowly walking through all of the printable textile methods .
loom is probably more satisfying to get working right, but the knitting machines are a joy to just stare at while they're working. Hypnotic.
Warping a loom by hand is a nightmare of repetitive tweaking, drawing each warp end through a heddle and adjusting the tension, one by one and back again. It's like restringing and tuning a guitar with hundreds of strings.
Even hand knitting is slightly better -- cast 250 stitches on to a circular needle then start the next row, only to find 10 rows later you've twisted it and are now knitting a Moebius sweater. Rip it out and repeat (sometimes referred to as "frogging" or "tinking").
Yeah, knitting machines are satisfying in many ways.
So in theory 3D-Knitting can produce a made-to-measure garment on demand, and has been able to for years.
And yet, no one actually offers to sell you a made-to-measure knitted garment. Why?
A few theories:
- Knits are stretchy so there's limited demand for M2M
- DFM/software issues - no one actually knows to generate a pattern from a set of sizes without human intervention
- Issues with OEE - it's inefficient to wait for orders to produce the garments because the capital cost of the machines is so high.
- Logistics - you don't want to deal with shipping everyone the right order.
I understand the appeal of this tech to techies. It's so cool to automate knitting!
Though it totally misses the point of actually knitting something, with your own hands. The time it takes, the details you need to think about, the skills you work on perfecting, the quiet evening on the sofa or in a cafe with friends, chatting and knitting away, all that goes into a piece of clothing that you've knitted. Letting a machine do that is completely missing out.
I feel similarly about AI generated music. Taking the musician out of the loop misses the point of the whole thing.
This is knitting as a method of mass-production. It's not cannibalizing hobby knitters making hats and gloves for their loved ones at Christmas. The comparison to AI music doesn't work because that is trying to occupy the same space as musical artists.
Depends whether you see it as a production method or an art/recreational activity. There can be both, and don't worry, hand-made products will always have a special value. Even if everybody can order custom made knitted sweater from a machine.
Knitting by hand is for fun, with a by product of getting clothes. No one does it to make all their clothes, it’s highly impractical in this day and age.
I interviewed these guys for an article on the use of seaweed in yarn and fabric. And I bought the 3D knit seaweed sweater. Great team, with a lot of heart and good intentions.
I'm also a hand knitter, and I don't really see any conflict between what they're doing and hand knitting. The grist of the yarn that you use as a hand knitter is generally much thicker than these machines commonly use. Commercial 3D knitting machines can do all of the stretchy, thin, and light stuff that the modern wardrobe is built around.
As folks note, this technology was really pioneered by Shimaseki's work in Japan just decades ago. What OC and the similar Brooklyn-based Tailored Industry are really innovating on is the business model and connection to production process. Folks like this are really serious about not producing all of the waste that comes with most fashion production processes, and it shows up at several levels of the stack.
For the HN crowd, TI's platform gives you more of a sense of why this sort of tech is really like the cloud for knitwear: https://tailoredindustry.com/platform
Really a fascinating part of the global fashion production world, and one we would all benefit from seeing grow.
I have a small sweater line I’m looking at doing in china right now but I have a long lasting fascination with the shima seki machines. If you were doing a short fashion run would TI be appropriate? How does one get their preferred yarn over to someone like TI?
TI says that they offer custom yarn at their "Flagship" level, with a $20k upfront cost. Not sure how that compares to setting up production overseas.
Look at their plan features chart: https://tailoredindustry.com/pricing/boutique
They definitely are a powerful option for smaller scale runs. Very much optimized to have the unit economics and turnaround time work for smaller brands.
I don't really know the answer around supplying your own yarn. I'd assume that's the abnormal case, but just a guess.
They pitch this as the panacea to fast fashion, but surely the solution to fast fashion is just to not buy and throw away so many clothes? I don't believe we buy cheap clothes because we can't find good quality clothes that last, but because we like owning lots of clothes and keeping up with trends. When my last laptop broke I was kind of happy. I thought "ooh now I can upgrade to a shiny new laptop guilt-free". I think that's the real problem.
I bought a 200 dollar jacket and it had holes in it within months, just from regular use. I have an old 3 dollar shirt I bought years ago and it's only now beginning to show wear.
One problem this shows, is that as a consumer I have no idea what the hell is quality clothing. Clearly, expensive does not always mean high quality. And I'm not buying "brand" clothing either.
Another problem is the dive to the bottom that the industry has suffered.
Your experience is very common, I have a fake nike sweatshirt I bought more than a decade ago from a random street seller (emergency on a trip) which still outlasts current brand clothes.
Consumers' ignorance is not the problem, it used to be generally true that the more expensive item was better. Every brand has seemingly decided to burn their furniture to heat the house though, and what we experience is not as much consumer ignorance as it is a lack of names deserving trust.
Buy second hand clothes. These are either very, very, cheap, and they last just long enough for me to get bored with them. Or they are merely fairly cheap and last almost forever because the stuff that quickly falls apart doesn't get resold, it gets discarded by the person who bought it new.
In either case I have lengthened the time between manufacturing and landfill and had the enjoyment of clothes that I would otherwise not have been able to afford along the way.
I think my parents knew this. I grew up with second hand clothes almost exclusively and didn't really know until I asked my parents about it when I was older. It is a great strat to find quality clothes.
This happened to me.
I tried to be a good boy and wrote to the company asking for zipper parts to fix it and they told me to buy another jacket.
So I looked for companies that advertise repairability and found Patagonia made the most believable claims. Quite reasonable now that I'm old and rich, but I wouldn't have had the choice when young and poor.
They knew what "slow fashion" was 100 years ago when shirt collars and sleeve cuffs were turned to double the life of the garment.
I've started buying "nicer" things purely for fit reasons, like I've realized that I'm a lean 6' guy with a long torso, so for shirts and especially sweaters a medium is too short and a large is too baggy— the correct size for me in off-the-rack items is a tall medium, and that's definitely not available everywhere.
So I'm extremely happy with a Land's End quarter zip that I picked up recently, and I hope that's a well-made piece that will last a while, but overall I completely agree that mass-produced clothing is a market for lemons; no one can tell what the good stuff is, so it's all assumed to be garbage and priced accordingly.
A “quality” jacket in the 1930s would cost 300-400$ or more inflation adjusted, it would also look less fashionable today, and feel somewhat less comfortable due to several concessions for durability in design. A durable quality jacket back then was also holding a majority market position, rather than being a niche good, which means that “quality clothes” do still seem to exist, but I’m always looking at 500-600$ for durable jeans or coats.
>but I’m always looking at 500-600$ for durable jeans
tf.
That’s clearly you looking for a specific fashion or intending to pay as much as you can.
Triple Aught Design jeans are $150 to $250 and I am skeptical you have anything that is outlasting them. Others brands surely as well. Seems to me you are still stuck in the “if it costs more…” line of thinking.
having burned though easily 10 pairs of Triple Aught pants of various designs, they are well made and attractive, but durability is not an outlier from my experience. each design consistently fails in the same area with regular use. i tend to repurchase the designs that fit and function well, but they all inevitably fall.
I recently ordered some Levis that I'm happy with, but I think there's also a limit for me in that certain life-things can happen that will end a garment regardless of how much was paid for it or how much it was babied.
I'm pretty disciplined about wearing a bib in the kitchen these days, but you can still get a glass of wine on it at the dinner table, or sparks from a campfire, or a cycling wipeout. Those are annoying at the best of times, but particularly if it ends a garment that you paid 3-5x normal price for specifically so you could have it forever.
No, I am just buying import Japanese jeans from the folk that bought all of the original high quality jeans making machines when the Americans moved to the flexi stuff, the jeans I buy last with next to no damage for 10-15 years despite near daily wear. I will grant you that I am paying a premium for both import, and a particular quality of fabric, but honestly I look like farmer Joe mostly.
Yep :/ There are just no good heuristics left for quality clothing. It's horrible. One thing I do genuinely have good experience with is Japanese denim. But that's about it.
I've been trying to buy winter coats at end of season (coincidentally; not chasing sales), and one thing is consistent: fabric content is only hinted at. "Full wool" but "slightly stretchy" - possible with a broadcloth woven wool, but more likely "full"!=100%. "Cashmere" at prices that can (at best) be 10% cashmere, but might be 2% just to avoid outright fraud.
I bought a really good-looking dark blue fedora; I received a really good-looking black fedora a size-and-a-1/2 too big. I had to fight them at the credit card level, because they offered me half off at best for a hat I can't wear.
What is inconsistent: only some of them are fraudulent fronts. I'd guess about 25-50% right now, based on my recent shopping experiences. But not all: I ordered some expensive gloves; their advertised fit was wrong; we settled on 50% off (I /can/ wear them, but it's not ideal, and their return policy clearly required me to ship back). That firm had shite measurement guides, but honest merchant fronting.
I've ordered super-cool button-front shirts that ended up being tissue-like fabric. Grrr...
Speaking of fabric... Amazon folded Fabric.com into their Borg cube, and you CANNOT buy fabric by weight online - for some goddamn reason. I want to buy 100% white cotton for a play costume, and need it thicker - between sheeting and terrycloth; closer to the latter; Nothing else really matters to me about it. But can I determine the cloth thickness/weight? Nope.
So: 50% swindlers; 75% idiots; buy clothes in person or else expect to throw a certain amount away.
In Europe if a garment says 100% New Wool it had better be just that. I have several coats with varying proportions of wool, nylon, etc. All bought secondhand and of very high quality compared to the price I paid.
Of course they aren't the latest fashion but clothes that last are by definition out of fashion for most of their existence.
>I bought a really good-looking dark blue fedora; I received a really good-looking black fedora a size-and-a-1/2 too big. I had to fight them
Ah, very relatable…
>buy clothes in person or else expect to throw a certain amount away.
That’s reasonable.
As I understand it, a big part of produced clothing just goes straight to waste to begin with. If everything was created on-demand, it would minimize that kind of waste.
> As I understand it, a big part of produced clothing just goes straight to waste to begin with.
My niece runs a business that relies on the way we discard clothes. She buys clothes from suppliers in India who source them from the bales of discarded clothes sent to them from Europe. Her suppliers have in effect sorted through the mountain of discards to find the ones that have sufficient value to sell back to us. She specifically buys clothes that have 'vintage' appeal (think tailored jackets rather than hoodies) and sells them primarily to students in a northern English city. Her business has done well enough to move from market stalls to a dedicated high street store and she is just branching out into 'vintage' kids clothes.
That would be great, a lot of clothes are made at sizes that don't sell very well and which get discounted, then discarded if they don't sell.
However, made on demand will likely cost more, plus you can't fit items first. Unless they make items for fitting which you can then order to have manufactured.
But yeah the main thing is that on-demand can never compete with mass production even if a big part of the mass produced stuff is discarded.
> on-demand can never compete with mass production even if a big part of the mass produced stuff is discarded.
This is definitely not universally true. E.g. photos are very cheaply printed on demand. Even on-demand books are printed at reasonable prices. Sure, mass production is cheaper (both for books and pictures), but the value difference of the individual product is high enough to bridge the price gap.
For cloth this area has found little exploration. TFA covers production at niche scale. If you would mass produce the looms to reduce the capital expense and heavily lean into customer value, e.g. individual fittings via 3d scans, as my sister comment proposes, or even just letting me customize my sweater with motive, color choice, garment etc., this could radically change the cost to value ratio. The company that has published TFA sells extremely bland apparel in a shop that looks just like any mass produced clothing shop and leaves all of the customer value of custom production on the table.
Last but not least: This "3d knitting" seems to need only a fraction of the labor of traditional sewed clothes. If textile production didn't default to underpaid labor under precarious working conditions in low income countries, it would probably already be cheaper.
From 3d printed clothing, the obvious next step should be to have your phone take a 3d scan of you, and send it to the clothing designer to print it to your actual body size and shape. We could have truly unique sizing (none of this S/M/L/XL stuff)!
Edge case: people who are in the process of changing their body size/shape. Growing children, people losing weight, people gaining weight (they're out there), will all occasionally want to buy for where their body is going to be in the future, not where it is now. How to accommodate them?
I'm sure models predicting how their body changes (based on various parameters and previous scans of the particular person and other people) could be built, allowing to optimize for longest time period of "decent fit" at the cost of "perfect fit now".
Yes, and people have been chasing that Grail for decades. It's always right around the corner. (Despite what another poster said, it IS being pursued commercially. And unobtainable so far.)
"If" is doing a lot of hold-your-breath, make-a-wish work in that sentence.
> surely the solution to fast fashion is just to not buy and throw away so many clothes?
"just don't do X" has basically never worked, it is not a serious solution to any problem.
> I don't believe we buy cheap clothes because we can't find good quality clothes that last, but because we like owning lots of clothes and keeping up with trends.
I will buy 5 things that last for 10 years if somebody gave me the option. Otherwise no, I'm not chasing fashion trends.
Honestly, even "good" brands seem to make a lot of low quality items these days. I honestly find it hard to find good, lasting, clothes.
If "the solution" depends on people changing their behaviour on their own (ideally by lowering their expectations/do the harder thing/etc), it is almost never "the solution". It is usually just wishful thinking.
This is an ad for a company that drop ships their product from another company that has made its business on offering production and fulfillment of canned (but customizable) 3D knit styles.
Are they dropshipping preexisting designs, or are they making custom orders to a knitting company?
Edit: totally sincere question, I don't know their process
Very very much an ad, including the current top level comment from the looks of things.
It’s only missing em dashes. At least someone cleaned those out.
Interestingly, this potentially has applications beyond clothing.
A while back, Lee Valley did a 3D knitted chisel roll using Kevlar and other materials, in support of the Canadian company which invented the 3D knitting process used (unfortunately, at the time, I didn't have the money or need for --- I've since updated my woodworking toolkit and have a nice set of chisels which it would have been perfect for, except it was discontinued and is no longer available...)
I'm kind of in this space - 3d knitting is pretty interesting, but knitting a sweater like that takes a long time (I forget how long, but I think it's 1-2 hours), so it's not really a solution for working at any sort of scale. Unless you build up inventory or have a ton of machines. But the machines are super expensive compared to regular knitting machines.
I also think that wholegarment knits look kind of cheap and that sewing actually adds structural integrity and durability to a garment.
But anything knitting or clothes related is really fun and challenging and good for them for making a business out of it.
"I also think that wholegarment knits look kind of cheap and that sewing actually adds structural integrity and durability to a garment."
This is an ongoing discussion in the handknitting community. Knitters generally hate seaming (we're not sewers!) so the most popular patterns tend to be seamless. However, many argue that this leads to shapeless, saggy garments that aren't as wearable.
Can anyone else comment on the durability claims here - I wear a lot of knitwear but in my experience it is almost never the case that they fail at the seams. Is the cut/sew mechanism of fabrication part of the weakening? (my jumpers tent to either wear through in elbows (patchable!) or ultimately get nicked/cut by something like a branch I failed to avoid).
They seem to have left out the most interesting part - what does that machine cost?
yeah. I was waiting for at least some kind of portal into the actual engineering and craft of the thing due to the name of the article, and was left with an advertisement flavored sour aftertaste.
Would be cool if it could also de-knit to modify clothing or reuse later. I.e if there is a hole: automatically deknit, splice in a replacement and fix it. Or if your belly growth: deknit and make that section slightly wider.
And can you use finer yarn as well, like lace? The reason a sweater is knit like it is, is because of the tradeoff between knitting time and material needed. But if labor becomes free, you should be able to knit much bigger yet more delicate stuff.
Edit: ah, deknitting is called frogging
So this is an ad for company that purchased an off-the-shelf industrial knitting machine and is trying to sell it as some new novel innovation with cringe "3d knitting" branding. If you go to the the manufacturer site you can find same talking points and plenty of logos: https://www.shimaseiki.com/wholegarment/
Absolutely no relation to these guys, but I have a hobby knitwear line and a longstanding fascination with Shima Seki.
The SS machines are unique, as far as I know. They are also SUPER hard to work with -- the software is opaque. The design skills matter. Those design skills have to hook up to the SS machine design system.
Hooking yarn is not the same thing as say bending steel - in terms of reliability, ease, variations. Lots of complexity here.
There have been some attempts at doing 3d knitting direct to retail, I recall an MIT startup that had a boutique on Newbury street, and eventually went D2C only, as well as some European brands.
The SS machines are a little bit of a product in search of a market as far as I can see -- they are amazing, they waste very little product, in theory unique, custom garments can be put out rapidly. In practice, they seem to be used as small-run / custom-run tools -- but the only way to provide that is to have skilled designers and engineers -- hence the middle layer.
Yes, I want one.
I think this is an uncharitable view of the information on offer. The linked page similarly brands the technique with a trademarked WHOLEGARMENT label, claiming it’s a world first, so it doesn’t seem a stretch to see how these folks got to claiming it’s novel and making a bit of a todo about how it’s different. It also seems to have some business model implications that on first approximation look less than favorable, so I think that helps to justify the need for a position paper like this.
According to the Shima Seiki history page: https://www.shimaseiki.com/company/dna/history/ it was a world first in 1995. That doesn't make it novel anymore in 2026.
I would nonetheless find it interesting to read an "ultimate guide" explaining how the knitting machines work, but this ain't it.
These are not cheap machines! Looking around online, i found a lot of 4 Shima Seiki machines listed for $40k! If someone is interested getting into knitting, I would recommend starting with some cheap hand-crank machines from a brand like Sentro. You will learn a lot more, and there is a lot you can do with knit tubes. If absolutely don't want a tube, you can get a so-called panel machine. I think you can find one on Amazon or Etsy - i forget the listing i saw, but it was like $500(much less than a Shima Seiki).
Here are a couple useful sites to get started:
https://machineknitting.fandom.com/wiki/Machine_Knitting_Wik...
https://www.knittingparadise.com/forums/machine-knitting.20/
But the site doesn't say anything about being new, and in fact says it was invented in 1995:
No, the bottom of the page says they subcontract production. So it's an infomercial for a company that markets sweaters they may or may not design. And they disclose that in the article, if very subtly.
Then perhaps the poster is drawing attention to the clever marketing, rather than the machine itself?
Uniqlo offers a few 3D knit items, I’ve been meaning to try them out. Pretty basic styles though.
Funny that they speak so negatively about "fast fashion". If anything I would expect on-demand clothes production contribute to an _increase_ in that phenomenon, rather than the opposite.
Not at these prices :-) $150 - $200 for a sweater is not cheap. I think of fast fashion in terms of "how many times do I have to wear it to get my money's worth?" If the answer is less than the number of times I'd wear it in a year, it's fast fashion. Of course, if you're a thrift shop shopper, most fashion is fast fashion.
My grandfather wrote a scifi utopia featuring printed-on-human garments similar to this ("Fahrt nach Futuras").
So you would wake up, wash then stand on some platform and have your daily outfit knitted on you. Not sure how he worked around the risk of strangling though lol.
Still funny. Thanks making it reality!
What a thoroughly modern world we live in. My first reaction was to check if this was an April Fool's blog post.
Right now I'm doing the opposite: 3D printing a loom for hand-knit garments.
https://www.printables.com/model/1483991-fall-is-looming-the...
Looms weave. You need a knitting machine to knit.
that's true, but there are also like 200 sock knitting machine designs for FDM printing out there , maybe they're just slowly walking through all of the printable textile methods .
loom is probably more satisfying to get working right, but the knitting machines are a joy to just stare at while they're working. Hypnotic.
Warping a loom by hand is a nightmare of repetitive tweaking, drawing each warp end through a heddle and adjusting the tension, one by one and back again. It's like restringing and tuning a guitar with hundreds of strings.
Even hand knitting is slightly better -- cast 250 stitches on to a circular needle then start the next row, only to find 10 rows later you've twisted it and are now knitting a Moebius sweater. Rip it out and repeat (sometimes referred to as "frogging" or "tinking").
Yeah, knitting machines are satisfying in many ways.
So in theory 3D-Knitting can produce a made-to-measure garment on demand, and has been able to for years.
And yet, no one actually offers to sell you a made-to-measure knitted garment. Why?
A few theories: - Knits are stretchy so there's limited demand for M2M - DFM/software issues - no one actually knows to generate a pattern from a set of sizes without human intervention - Issues with OEE - it's inefficient to wait for orders to produce the garments because the capital cost of the machines is so high. - Logistics - you don't want to deal with shipping everyone the right order.
Which clanker generated this slop for you? I pasted the first 2 lines of this post into the free Gemini version and got 3 out of 4 of these theories.
Why are you posting this to HackerNews?
This isnt a hype board, for consumer products. Its supposed to be a tech first community.
not sure to understand your point, knitting is not a tech field to you, or the content itself of the article is not tech oriented enough ?
I think maybe OP is knotted up about it pretty obviously being an ad. And rightfully so.
Seriously 3D knitting… then going on about 2D patterns?
I understand the appeal of this tech to techies. It's so cool to automate knitting!
Though it totally misses the point of actually knitting something, with your own hands. The time it takes, the details you need to think about, the skills you work on perfecting, the quiet evening on the sofa or in a cafe with friends, chatting and knitting away, all that goes into a piece of clothing that you've knitted. Letting a machine do that is completely missing out.
I feel similarly about AI generated music. Taking the musician out of the loop misses the point of the whole thing.
But this talks about the mass production of garments. Nobody at the Zara factory is having a quiet evening knitting on the sofa.
The idea of this is: knitting on demand, customizable, less waste.
You can still knit your things at home if you want to do your own stuff, or relax a bit...
This is knitting as a method of mass-production. It's not cannibalizing hobby knitters making hats and gloves for their loved ones at Christmas. The comparison to AI music doesn't work because that is trying to occupy the same space as musical artists.
Depends whether you see it as a production method or an art/recreational activity. There can be both, and don't worry, hand-made products will always have a special value. Even if everybody can order custom made knitted sweater from a machine.
Knitting by hand is for fun, with a by product of getting clothes. No one does it to make all their clothes, it’s highly impractical in this day and age.
Most garments have been knitted on knitting machines since the 1850s
No, it doesn't miss the point. Different people have different interests. Knitting just hits more overlapping Venn diagrams than just one.
The goal is the path... a concept often foreign to western, to contemporary, to techies.