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The Bizarre Fabrics That Fashion is Betting On

posted by Fnord666 on Saturday September 14 2019, @10:36AM   
from the at-least-it's-not-a-meat-dress dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49550263

It's a short article describing the strange materials people are experimenting with to make clothing. There is mushrooms, pineapple, PVC, and others. It's light on details (maybe there are other better articles with more technical information), but I thought it was interesting and worth sharing and discussing.

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Original Submission

• bit short on info? (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 15 2019, @05:15PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 15 2019, @05:15PM (#894381)

  just guessing, but the textil industry has optimized itself into a corner.
  clothes are cheap; the common materials to make them (cotton wool) are cheap because optimization.
  anything new and even better has a hhard time because all the machinery, from tractor add-on to the "spinning machines" are optimized for those.
  optimization reduces cost but also makes the whole "tool chain" inflexible.
  the corner reeks of "cheap", "nevermind if it doesnt last, it's cheap, buy new" to "to expensive investment to retool", etc. etc.

  there, ofc is abrasion of the textile machines, so "hard" fibers, like linen, hemp, coconut and banana "use up" the parts that are in contact with the fibers faster.

  further, the taste of the masses, and textile IS masses, is fickle.
  one bad news and the whole investment for the "hard fiber" machines goes out the windows because people stop buying it.
  cotton and wool are optimized into a hole of cheapness, there's no way people can boycott it, unless they have muchos money, make there own textile or go nakeeed!

  what i would like to see is more stuff mixed at the thread level: linen and cotton(?), hemp and cotton(?), wool and either cotton, linen or hemp (beware the kosher clothes, so plant ink on leather parchment that dropped from the heavens says to not mix animal and plant fibers)?
  also, 2-level fibers, that is fibers that are micro woven into a thread BEFORE actually woven into cloth? imagine a coil, with diameter of 1 mm, then using this coil to make a bigger 5 cm diameter coil. experiment with the inner coil going anti-clockwise and the bigger coil going clockwise, vice-versa(*)?

  note: most oil-derived fibers are crap for clothes but okay for special application, like war or transport but most certainly easy to "fiberize" for existing machines (no retooling required)?

  (*) reply spinning/weaving industry BOSS:"HAHAHA! forget THAT. people want to REMOVE clothes from each other, not but on more!"