The clothing industry is one of the few remaining trades that rely on the basic skills of the operative on the factory floor for the major contribution to the article produced. However, faced with the problem of skilled personnel leaving the industry and the need for high production rates, clothing manufacturers have increasingly turned to the use of automatic and semiautomatic machinery for designing, cutting, and making up garments.
Computer-aided design (CAD) has helped reduce the time between the designer’s original drawing of a garment and the making up of samples. CAD allows the designer to experiment with different fabrics, styles, and patterns without cutting a piece of fabric until a version of the garment is agreed upon by the designer and the retailer.
Once production costs for the garment have been calculated, a series of basic patterns called slopers are cut and made into wearable samples. These samples are then tested on models to ensure that the fit is good and to finalize sizing of the pattern. Manufacturers use tables of body measurements to scale patterns to larger or smaller sizes. These measurements are fed into the CAD system, which calculates where the pattern needs to be enlarged or cut down to fit a particular size. When all the pattern pieces have been determined, a marker is produced, that is, an optimum layout for how the pieces are arranged for cutting, depending on the width of the material, any pattern or pile on the fabric, and how the garment is to hang on the body.
Cutting
The next stage in the manufacture of all types of clothing is the laying out and cutting of the material. This stage must be carefully planned so that there is a minimum of wasted cloth; in the past, it required a number of fairly skilled personnel and was done by hand. Laying out of material prior to cutting must be done very accurately, and modern machines are so precise that even checked and striped fabrics can be aligned.
When the material has been layed out on the cutting table, the patterns are marked out on the top layer as a guide for the cutting-machine operator. Couture garments are still cut by hand, but mass production cutters are manual- or computer-controlled operations, using straight-knife cutters. In manually controlled cutting, the cutter has to take care that the knife remains perfectly straight as it passes through the layers of fabric to ensure that each piece remains the same size. With computerized cutting, a vacuum is used to compress the layers and prevent them from moving while cutting is taking place. Up to 10 in. (25 cm) of fabric can be compressed down to 3 in. (7.5 cm) with a vacuum, the maximum thickness of material that can be cut. Laser cutting machines cut fabrics with a laser beam rather than a knife, and machines have now been developed that use high-pressure water or plasma jets, especially for use on plastic or leather.
The machine room
Many clothing factories use an assembly line method to sew the cut pieces of cloth into garments. The bundling system has the machinists working on single operations, such as sewing the front of the garment to the back, setting in sleeves, or joining tops and bottoms of collars. The unit production system is similar but uses an overhead hanger to move the garment on to the next stage in the operation. Modular systems need fewer workers, and each is responsible for completing an entire garment. The machinists move around the factory with the clothes they are sewing, making it more interesting for them, as they get to work on a number of different operations, and reducing the manufacturer’s costs, as there is less unfinished work in progress at any one time.
