The Knitwear Design Process

Knitwear design is a process and a profession distinct from fashion design, which makes use of the output of textile design, and is principally about designing exact shapes. By contrast knitwear design involves the creation of the knitted fabric itself as an integral part of the design of a garment, in which precise shaping is usually less important (because knitted fabric is much more stretchable than woven fabric). (The other major division of clothing design is contour design, which covers underwear and swimwear.)

The workers in the knitwear industry are divided into several very different groups performing different roles, recruited in different ways from different social groups. The development of garments to the stage where they can be mass produced is a collaborative effort between designers, technicians and sampling make-up staff (Eckert and Murray, 1993). In order to explain the use of CAD systems and the roles of the different groups, we describe this process for a typical company large enough to afford CAD systems; there is considerable variation in working practices.

Research. This is the term given to absorbing ideas (from other people's garments or the outside world), and learning about the ideas, topics, colours and features "in fashion" for the coming season. This constitutes the construction of a search space for the design of a garment. The degree of scope the designer has varies greatly; sometimes the designer's brief is to copy someone else's garment making the minimum number of changes to evade the copyright laws. Constraints on the design come from human anatomy, the needs of the target customer, and the intended price.

Designing. This is the development of a detailed design for a garment. It is usually proceeded by the designer making successive modifications to the design of a previous garment (her own or someone else's), either with sketches on paper or in her imagination. Designers communicate their ideas with sketches, swatches or verbal descriptions of differences from other garments. (A swatch is a piece of knitted fabric produced as an example). Designs for stitch structures are sketched or knitted by the designer by hand or with a manual machine. (A stitch structure is a combination of stitches that make up a pattern, comprising a certain number of rows and columns, which may then be repeated.) At this point a decision is made about whether to work the design out in detail and produce samples. Garments using only simple stitch structures can be worked out completely on paper without involving technicians, but garments with more complex stitch structures can only be designed in detail in collaboration with the technicians. Designers work on their own, even when they have colleagues, and usually under time pressure, which is sometimes intense.

Entering Jacquards. This is the programming of a stitch structure in the programming formalism of a particular knitting machine. This is typically the transfer of a design on paper, but simple stitch structures can programmed directly. When they are programmed they are called Jacquards. (The term originally meant a specific type of multi-colour pattern, by analogy to Jacquard looms.) Who does this depends on the company: sometimes the designer and sometimes the technician; a few companies employ someone specially to enter Jacquards. If a design for a stitch structure is selected for further development, the technician has to knit the fabric on a power machine with the intended yarn to determine the height and width of the pattern in real life, before its placing on the shape can be worked out in detail.

Programming. The knitting machine technician's primary job is to program the knitting machine to knit the design produced by the designer, but to do so at a reasonable cost (in other words, as fast as possible while minimising problems and producing acceptable results). This requires a detailed knowledge of the capabilities of the knitting machine and the limitations of what can be achieved with a particular yarn, as well as competence with the CAD system. The most complex programs can take up to two weeks' work to develop. Programming knitting machines requires the same type of thinking as programming computers in assembler, especially in that one has to keep track of the states of a lot of different locations in the machine, and modify values and move them around as efficiently as possible. Before the advent of electronically controlled knitting machines, the programs for flat bed machines were implemented on rolls of two meter long metal punch cards; at this time the designers had no contact at all with the technology.

Make Up. The final stage in the development of the garment is the production of a prototype, using the fabric produced by the program on the industrial knitting machine, which is done by the sampling make up staff (or sometimes the designer herself). This includes making cutting patterns for the pieces of a cut-and-sew garment, according to the specifications provided by the designer or the intended customer (usually a buyer for a retail chain).

The development of a garment that is both an acceptable design and that can be produced at the right cost often involves a lot of backtracking. Almost all machine knitted garments are produced to strict price constraints, and the length of time a garment takes to knit is a major determinant of its cost. (The latest power machines can knit all sorts of fancy structures, but too slowly for them to be commercially viable.) So the technicians have to devise the most efficient programs possible, and tell designers if their designs aren't economic at particular price point. Designers often come up with stitch structures that cannot be knitted on an industrial machine, or that are too expensive to produce (that is, too slow or problematic to knit). Usually the technicians then work with the designers to reach a good compromise between cost and appearance. This can involve a lot of iteration, as can finding good ways to place patterns onto shapes. Because of the strong time constraints they work under, technicians sometimes make major modifications to the design without consulting the designer, without much concern for the appearance of the result.

The advent of knitting machines capable of producing much more complex stitch structures, combined with the development of CAD systems that designers can use (for only part of their work, and only if they get access to them) has created an overlap between the roles of designers and technicians that has never existed before.

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