Carbon Chemist

Tag: fashion

  • Your Next Pair of Walmart Pants Could Be 3D Woven

    Your Next Pair of Walmart Pants Could Be 3D Woven

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    The team has also developed a separate app that remotely scans a customer’s body to design a custom-fit pair of pants. You can use it today to order custom jeans, though they are cut and sewn in the traditional way—Unspun hasn’t yet bolted the software onto the machines. Right now, machine operators choose Vega’s settings to create the product. Unspun is working on software that would translate a design into direct commands to Vega, so retailers or fashion brands could feed their virtual creations into the machine and then get a wearable prototype in minutes.

    Unspun’s vision is to one day have hundreds of Vega machines across the US. A customer of one of Unspun’s retail clients would get a body scan, choose the type of garment they want, and as soon as they click purchase, send the design to the nearest Vega machine, which would output their order the same day. A custom fit means fewer returns, and because many returns are sent to the landfill or incinerated, that means waste and emissions are reduced even more.

    Walmart does have a successful program to curb its suppliers’ emissions that involves energy efficiency and renewable energy projects at factories. But when Walmart VP of sourcing Kyle Carlyle visited Unspun’s micro-factory last year, he was struck first by the giant American flag hanging above the machines. In 2021 Walmart announced that it was committing $350 billion (in addition to a 2013 $250 billion commitment) to support US suppliers. The move wasn’t just good marketing—in a 2019 survey, 85 percent of its customers said it was important that Walmart carry American-made products—but also one that would help future-proof Walmart’s business.

    “My team takes care of what Walmart calls surety of supply—essentially, building in resilience to how we source,” he says. He’s talking about a supply chain that can absorb shocks from natural disasters, pandemics, political unrest, and the like, and still deliver goods quickly enough to keep up with trends.

    3D Thinking

    Closeup of 3D printed denim fabric

    Photograph: Unspun

    The first step to making 3D woven chinos is completely rethinking how they’re designed. Typically, a designer will create a 2D tech pack with the cut shapes, and then select the fabric for look, feel, and performance based on swatches. But the machines require the selection of the individual threads going into the machine, plus envisioning the whole design as a series of 3D tubes. Knitwear designers are used to this mode of thinking. Designers of woven products—T-shirts, jeans, and pants—are not. “The designers are often getting to think about designing the fabric for the first time, rather than just the product made for that fabric,” Unspun’s Martin says.

    The possibilities afforded by 3D weaving are expansive. In September, Unspun worked with the designer label Ekhaus Latta to create several looks for New York Fashion Week, including shimmery plastic-tape-and-cotton pants. In the glass-walled showroom, Martin pulls another example off the rack: pants that looked like Chanel bouclé, but on acid, with a psychedelic pattern you could fall right into. Someday, a designer could upload an image and have it woven right into the fabric.

    But for now, the goal is more mundane: ensuring that when Average Joe walks into his local Walmart, he can find a pair of work pants in his favorite style and the right size. If it has a little American flag label, well, that’s just a bonus.

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  • 5 Best Sturdy Stockings (2024): Tights, Pantyhose, Sustainable

    5 Best Sturdy Stockings (2024): Tights, Pantyhose, Sustainable

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    Whether you call them stockings, tights, or pantyhose, I love wearing them all year round. Sheer black hose make any outfit sultry, and skin-color ones are like leg makeup. Fishnets and patterns are just fun. If you’ve only ever worn pantyhose in an egg from the drugstore, it’s time to level up. Those ones tend to run and tear easily, sometimes after a single wear—or while you’re still wearing them. They may cost you just a few bucks, but once they’ve ripped, they go with the rest of the world’s textile waste—straight to a landfill.

    You don’t have to spend a lot to get hosiery that will last. We tried a few brands that promise durability. We wore them for a few washes and also tugged and yanked and tried to rip them. No tights are going to be bomb-proof, but these ones come pretty close.

    Brenda Stolyar, Nena Farrell, Louryn Strampe, and Jaina Grey contributed testing to this guide.

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  • Greener way to dye denim could cut the environmental impact of jeans

    Greener way to dye denim could cut the environmental impact of jeans

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    Harmful chemicals are used to dye jeans blue

    Getty Images

    A new technique for dyeing denim using a chemical that turns blue in sunlight could slash the environmental impact of jeans manufacturing.

    Blue denim is dyed with indigo – a compound once extracted from plants but usually synthesised today. Harmful chemicals such as sodium dithionite are needed to make indigo soluble in water so that it can be used for dyeing. These chemicals produce toxic fumes that can harm the health of textile workers, and also lead to toxic pollution in waste water.

    Now, Ditte Hededam Welner at the Technical University of Denmark and her colleagues have developed a new process that instead uses a natural precursor to indigo called indican.

    “Indican is also a natural product, so it’s not anything artificial or weird,” says Hededam Welner. “But the good thing about it is that it is soluble, so you can just basically dip your textile in it, which you cannot do with indigo. That’s why it became such an appealing solution to this because you can simply omit so many of the harsh chemicals.”

    There is one key disadvantage, though: indican is colourless, so the compound must be converted into indigo after it has been applied to a material. One way to do this is just to leave it in sunlight for several hours.

    “I don’t know if consumers would like that, but, over time, as you wear a pair of indican-soaked jeans out in the sunlight, then it will turn blue,” says Hededam Welner. “I think that’s a gimmick, right? You could do that.”

    The team found two methods that could instead provide the faster and more repeatable results demanded by modern manufacturing: one using enzymes from plants and one using electrical lights.

    Using light is a more straightforward process that cuts the environmental impact of dyeing compared with using indigo by 73 per cent when assessed on a European Commission metric that takes into account carbon dioxide emissions, land use, water consumption and ozone depletion. Using enzymes led to an even greater reduction of 92 per cent.

    Hededam Welner says that with further research, the process could be made cheaper and more efficient, but there are major obstacles ahead – not least of which is establishing a supply chain for the 80,000 tonnes of indican that would be needed to produce the 4 billion pairs of jeans manufactured each year.

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