Ziyan Wei

Increase garment availability and wearability with modular design

I am concerned about the large amount of inventory generated by the apparel market that eventually becomes garbage. Disposing of inventory by incineration and burial is one of the cheapest ways to dispose of it, compared to other sustainable ways. But it is also the most polluting to the environment. Overproduction, overconsumption and clothing waste have always plagued the apparel industry. A huge amount of discarded clothing is disposed of as garbage every year worldwide.

When you buy a piece of clothing, you may need a pair of pants, a jacket to match it, and your closet is constantly stuffed, which is not what I want to see. I want to design an outfit that offers you multiple possibilities to match, an outfit that can give you multiple different looks, which is what I want to achieve in this project.

I started to think in terms of increasing the utilization of clothing and thought of the modular design that I often see in product design and architectural design, which breaks down a complex structure into different modules for design. Different areas have different roles. I thought if I could put such a concept in garment design, it would be great. So I considered how to modularize garments in fashion design.

It is available in a variety of ways to wear them, and you can freely mix and match them.This way you can get more sets of clothes in different ways of combining one set of clothes. Reducing the number of pieces of clothes in your closet and providing more wearing possibilities is an idea I would like to propose.

I design garments with a modular approach in order to increase the utilization of the garments and the pleasure of wearing them. In a way, this is also a sustainable attitude. The pattern design of the mortise and tenon construction echoes the theme of modular design. By matching different color groups for different people and then producing the fabric, fabric waste is reduced. In my designs, patterns, motifs and colors are interwoven and complement each other. All of these make up my designs.

Alibaba's 2019 sales figures – The table below reflects the sales data of individual items with the change of seasons. We all choose appropriate clothes according to the seasonal weather, which means we have clothing items in our closet for different seasons, and the utilization of most items is only reflected in fixed seasons. This point piqued my interest, if when I combine the higher selling items in the data with the lower selling items, will it fit multiple seasons?

Here is the sales data for 2019 from Alibaba, the largest online shopping platform in China, which I think is the most accurate because of the epidemic in 2020 and the change in people's economic status and spending power.

In this data recorded the percentage of people's spending in 2019 in the fashion category. The data shows that among all categories, T-shirts, slacks and shirts are the items with the largest percentage of purchases, while suits and jackets account for a smaller percentage of such items.

Pattern experiment

Toile

I wanted the clothes to be more than just a look, but to offer more wearing possibilities to people. As a designer, I want to increase the utilization of clothes and make them as fresh as possible.

I was researching some modular architectural designs and I came up with a very old Chinese building structure - the mortise and tenon structure. This structure is found in most ancient Chinese wooden buildings. It has the same concept as these modular buildings before it, making the structure more stable by some combination of shapes. Or it is very suitable for modular design. It's a way to connect the dots of modular design. So I want to show this structure flatly.

I designed the final color palette based on seasonal color colors. You can choose fabric colors and patterns based on the test results (seasonal color test pdf attached) and your own preferences.

PDF: Color card

This is a seasonal color test, which tests which seasonal color you are more suitable for. This test is to place swatches of different seasons on your face and observe the changes in your face to find the most suitable color module for you. I extracted these colors and made swatches, from which I picked some representative colors to make patterns. Before buying clothes you can use our printed swatches to do this test and find your best color to help you choose.

In comparing the optimized and pre-optimized press pleats, it can be seen that the optimized press pleats are much flatter.

In considering the use of fabrics I thought about the fact that when we wear a form-fitting formal dress, there are some movements in our daily activities that can be particularly constricting to the body. I did an experiment where I asked him to wear the uniform to do some of our daily movements and pay attention to the performance of the clothes under human activities.

I was more inspired by the work of an artist. This artist's origami work is about changing paper by folding it twice in different directions. I started to try to optimize them to make it fit the garment better. Here I added an I-pleat, which is pressed through a combination of I-pleat and organ pleats.

PDF: View pdf

Ziyan Wei

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Royal College of Art