The Future of Fashion Tech

ROMA AGRAWAL

I watch a lot of TV, I have to admit, and one of the shows that I absolutely adore watching is about sewing and making clothes out of waste materials, new materials, and all sorts, and the incredible pieces of fashion that come out of that. And so I got a second-hand sewing machine, and I'm trying my own hand at making my own clothes. And I have had some degree of success so far. Am I the most fashionable person in the world with my creations? Probably not. But I think it's a very exciting addition to my wardrobe.

I'm Roma Agrawal and you're listening to Create The Future from The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. And this week, we're going to take a look at the world of fashion engineering. New fibres, 3D printing, electromagnetic weaving. These are just a few of the innovations that engineers are working on in fashion. What kinds of possibilities do these changes mean for the future?

TANYA SAHA GUPTA

We're really coming back to a portion of time where people are innovating on the materials that they're making

ROMA AGRAWAL

Joining us this week are sustainable fashion business founder Tanya Saha Gupta and mechanical engineer and fashion designer Louise Katzovitz.

LOUISE KATZOVITZ

I see a lot of innovation in leather technology these days. People are making leathers out of mushrooms, pineapple skins, cactus.

TANYA SAHA GUPTA

When you think about circular fashion, you sort of think about either giving it to a charity shop or selling it online. Unfortunately, around 78% of the clothes sent to charity shops will just end up in landfill.

ROMA AGRAWAL

So join us as we reimagine the wardrobes of tomorrow.

I'm really excited to have two amazing people here with me today. One of them is Louise, who's an engineer and creates incredible fashion pieces, which we're going to hear more about. And the other is Tanya, who runs her own business on circular economy, to create more sustainability and she also happens to be my cousin. So I'm very excited to have them both here. So we'll start with Louise. Can you tell us a little bit about how you brought your mechanical engineering background together with fashion?

LOUISE KATZOVITZ

So I am Louise Katzovitz. I went to school for mechanical engineering at Northeastern University in Boston. I worked in product design for a few years and I decided to get a second degree in fashion design. And so being an engineer and having this interest in fashion design, I wanted to combine the two into really cool, unique wearable pieces that just showcase different kinds of technology and kind of what we could see people wearing in the future.

ROMA AGRAWAL

Tanya, can you tell us a little bit about what motivated you to work in the space of sustainable fashion?

TANYA SAHA GUPTA

I am the founder of Resale Future and at Resale Future we're fixing the fashion industry by giving fashion brands a digital trail of their products and powering a second-hand marketplace for them. I got into this space by a very personal incident that happened at university. We all lived in one same university halls buying pretty much the same things, but never sharing. And it just occurred to me that there just wasn't an efficient system where that was facilitated or even encouraged. And that's when I realised the power of tech and why we hadn't really updated the way we were buying and selling things since the invention of eBay. And that was in the early nineties. It was still a very cumbersome process. No one really had time to take pictures and input all the information. And I just knew that this information existed somewhere online and I wanted to be able to use that information to make this process easier.

ROMA AGRAWAL

So could you tell me a little bit about what sort of engineering technologies you're using for this concept?

TANYA SAHA GUPTA

A majority of retail moved online, which meant we had huge data sets of what people were buying, who they were, what size they were, what colour they were buying, what materials they were buying. This didn't really exist before because usually if someone walked into the store, bought something online, you had no information to link this person to this product. So it really started with the boom of the online industry starting to use these datasets to give customers access back to this dataset. So in terms of like, novel engineering, there really isn't anything new. It's more about how can we use the data that already exists and use it in a more efficient way.

ROMA AGRAWAL

Louise, same question for you. Can you maybe describe some of the engineering technologies you're using in your work?

LOUISE KATZOVITZ

I use a variety of technologies. One I can think of is I recreated the Zendaya breastplate that she had worn a few years ago. And so I used photogrammetry to scan my body. So photogrammetry is taking a bunch of photos from different angles and then uploading that and creating a 3D model out of those images. And so I used that to design the breastplate that matched my geometry and then I 3D printed it. That kind of technology is cool. It kind of goes off of your work, Tanya, of like what size are people? Like you could scan your body and get more information about people's sizes. What if they bought a certain garment online? Like what is their size and how did that correlate? How did that fit? So that would reduce returning certain types of garments and like the shipping back and forth.

ROMA AGRAWAL

Louise, could you maybe tell us a little bit about some of the new textiles that may have emerged through the work of different types of engineers?

LOUISE KATZOVITZ

This is probably my favourite topic and like where I think engineering can meet the biggest impact in fashion design. And it's really textiles, hundreds and thousands of years ago, starting with only natural fibres, linens, cottons, things you could grow. And then once the industrial revolution occurred, you started getting plastics into textiles. You have vegan leathers, which are again, just plastic. We started from a great place, like everything was compostable, you could mend things, and now you get these plastics that are really difficult to mend and people just throw out since they're so cheap. But we're really coming back to a portion of time where people are innovating on the materials that they're making. I see a lot of innovation in leather technology these days. People are making leathers out of mushrooms, pineapple skins, cactus. I think there was a mango one that like, from the mango industry, like you have this waste of the skin. And so they were using the skin and turning that into a leather textile, which is just great overall for sustainability.

ROMA AGRAWAL

I mean, I would be so into it if I could just walk around smelling like a mango the whole time, but I'm guessing that's not how that works.

LOUISE KATZOVITZ

I have no idea. Maybe it does smell like it. That would be a great product.

TANYA SAHA GUPTA

It's really interesting because yes, like you said, you know, vegan leather is completely plastic and it takes around four to five hundred years to decompose. But I think because so many people bought into that industry or bought into that idea, there's been so many cool innovations in the leather space. I think the mushroom leather is one that's like super promising and unfortunately, they still do have a bit of coating of plastic, or some of them do, but it means that it's as durable, but it's reduced how long it would take to decompose in a landfill site. Even things like glitter in the cosmetic industry, it's used everywhere, even like as kids we used to play with it. Now they've developed new glitter from wood pulp and sap that's been able to like create the exact same, you know, glitter effect and been able to just bend light to produce that effect from wood pulp. So hopefully we're now seeing that in nail varnishes, we're seeing it in like, eye shadows.

LOUISE KATZOVITZ

There's a really cool engineering device that L'Oréal made where you use cartridges to make a lipstick shade. And so you only have these like three cartridges, you can scan a colour in your environment, and then that machine will like choose the ratio to extrude some of the material and then you mix it with the brush and you have a new lipstick.

ROMA AGRAWAL

So let's talk a little bit about environmental concerns and sustainability. So Tanya, if I start with you, can you talk a little bit about the idea of what does circular fashion mean to start off with and then how can we achieve that in different ways?

TANYA SAHA GUPTA

So the way I think about circular fashion is loving a product and then caring for where it ends up. Circularity is essentially a closed loop. So you love a product, you buy it, you wear it multiple times. The most sustainable outfit you have is the one in your wardrobe. But when it is time for you to, either you don't fit it or it doesn't match your style, to find someone who would actually love and use that product the same way you loved it when you first received it. So that's how I think about circular fashion and what I'm trying to do is making that process digital and easy to monitor. At the minute, when you think about circular fashion, you sort of think about either giving it to a charity shop or selling it online. Unfortunately, around 78% of the clothes sent to charity shops will just end up in landfill. And the reason is because a lot of the times when we end up sending our clothes to charity shops, we've kept it for 10 years, 12 years, styles have evolved. It's not something that will just sell off the shelf immediately, or it's not in a very good condition. So it ends up actually not just going directly into a landfill. It ends up actually travelling around the world to multiple countries and ends up unfortunately in the global South or East that has to then deal with the waste that we produce. And the reason that's happening is because the products that are being produced today are so cheap and pretty much considered a consumable, where we wear it once and then throw it away. So we need to be making products much better, but at the same time facilitating where that really ends up. There are actually a lot of legislation that's coming into place within the EU. The UK government has started the Prince of Wales initiative and the major luxury brands have now started introducing something like a digital product passport into their products. What the UK has done, it's enforced it on a few companies, the major luxury brands, but actually in the EU, this is a law that's going to be coming into place for any product that's sold within the EU. And what the digital product passport means is it needs to give its customers information on where has the product been produced? What's its recyclability? What materials were used? Where it came from? This is going to be a huge project over the next four years, because everything's going to be very transparent, they're going to have to go back to their producers and see and care about who's making their products. Where is the cotton coming from? Is it ethical? Because now there is going to be transparency.

ROMA AGRAWAL

Yeah, so it sounds like one of the biggest things we can do from the engineering perspective is use the data smart and log the data and so on. But it's worth pointing out that the reason the circularity is so important in the first place is because of the environmental concerns, which is the incredible amount of water and chemicals that are used to produce the clothes, the greenhouse emissions that come out and also the poor labour conditions. You know, Tanya, you mentioned that a lot of waste ends up in the global south. And I think a lot of production and poorly paid wages come in from the global south as well. So, I guess with consumers having a bit more information, such as this digital passport that you were describing, we can start to interrogate that and decide, you know, do we want to buy this piece of clothing in the first place and make people care? I want to talk a little bit about people with different bodies and requirements. So Louise, could you talk to us a little bit about making fashion more accessible to people with disabilities, for example?

LOUISE KATZOVITZ

One of the projects I had done was a self-lacing corset. The project came up just as a fun idea. There were the self-lacing shoes that were from Back to the Future. And then Nike had actually made those shoes as a reality. So I decided to like make that corset. And I had a lot of people come out and say, this would be an incredible accessibility garment if someone couldn't reach their zipper due to limited mobility they could use like an electronic zipper essentially.

TANYA SAHA GUPTA

Just to add to that from a perspective of, you know, after sale care and obviously, you know, a lot of people find clothing on the high street quite accessible in terms of cost, but it doesn't fit everyone or it's not built for everyone. There are a lot of cool new businesses that are incorporating repairs and alterations within businesses and, you know, encouraging more fashion brands to offer that as a service as an add-on after you buy. And they're making it very simple, which is also adding to the sustainability aspect by making clothes that actually fit you, that you will care for more, you know, an ability to alter it or upcycle it after you're done wearing it in a certain way. So that's also pretty interesting, again, using information that already exists and helping customers access these tailors and alterations.

ROMA AGRAWAL

So I've heard about new fibres. I've heard about 3D printing, electromagnetic weaving, various types of innovations that engineers are coming up with that tie into fashion. What kind of possibilities do these sorts of changes mean?

LOUISE KATZOVITZ

I always view a lot of this like new technology as research and development in terms of engineering product design companies. You have a lot of these one-offs and a lot of examples of technology, but they won't have trickled down yet to everyone wearing 3D-printed clothes or have LEDs everywhere. And a lot of it has to do with how prohibitively expensive some of these garments are. So I think with any technology, like you start with one-offs and then as you develop, you develop it for larger production so it can trickle down to more people. I had recently seen a dress that was entirely covered in LED panels and you could customise what the dress looked like. You could have little animations. So I think something like that would be really cool where you have this one item that is maybe more expensive, but you are able to customise it and have an outfit that is extremely versatile and you can wear it any way you want.

TANYA SAHA GUPTA

I mean, personally, I think just focusing on when you buy clothes, looking at the materials that are used to make it has changed my shopping habits personally. Just being more educated on what polyester even is. I went to an engineering school and most people there did not know that what they're wearing is made of oil. And unfortunately, it's just an education thing. I think educating people is going to be so important for people to find that balance of like, yes, okay, you still do need to wear clothes and you still need it to be accessible. You know, linen can be expensive, cotton can be more expensive. So there is going to be a balance. So if you are buying something polyester, make sure it's not something you're going to wear only five times, but something that will actually last your lifetime. For me personally, it's been focusing on the materials that's fixed my balance.

ROMA AGRAWAL

Can we talk a little bit about social media to wrap up? You know, you both use social media in different ways for your businesses. So I would love to hear a little bit about what that's like. Louise, if we start with you, I'm interested in maybe particularly the engagement of people interested in fashion but with this whole engineering angle, do they come to you for the fashion but stay for the engineering or what does that look like?

LOUISE KATZOVITZ

I really love like posting about this stuff and like one of my huge pillars and why I post all of these videos on social media. I really want to get more women into engineering. And so I think using some of these industries that are a majority female, even going into like beauty industries as well, and being like, oh I could go into chemical engineering and learn how to make materials to make the world a better place. And just showing the possibilities to people.

TANYA SAHA GUPTA

I think my social media has kind of evolved towards my interest in sustainability and talking about new innovations and technologies in fashion. For me, I think it's been really exciting to be able to be that education and entertaining piece that people wouldn't normally consume that sort of information. They're probably there for the fashion aspect and then they're being told about all these cool new innovations. But what's also been really exciting for me is that, on LinkedIn in particular, I've had so many people who are coders, a lot of women who are data scientists, developers, and they've always been interested in fashion and they're trying to look for a new career change. And they had no idea that that's where they could use their skill set. There are just so many roles developing now within fashion and innovation. But also I think as a consumer, most of my friends had no idea about the information I'm sharing with them about sustainability and innovation within fashion. But everyone is affected by fashion, even like the Met Gala, for example. It's the biggest fashion event of the year. But this year they used a ton of new innovation in their exhibit. They used something called Pepper Ghost Illusion that essentially uses, you know, projections and AI to bring previous pieces back to life. It was something that they've never done before. So it's quite exciting for people now who follow the Met Gala also to learn about these new innovations.

ROMA AGRAWAL

What's interested me about this conversation is the very different threads, you could say, where engineering might have a big impact on the future of fashion. One of them being on data and the different types of data that you can attach to a piece of clothing and how all of that data might be used to reduce consumption and make our wardrobes more sustainable in the future. And the other really interesting one was the material science, where you're actually working on the atomic scale to create materials that don't take hundreds of years to decompose in the natural environment. And I'm really excited to see where all of these innovations take us in the future. You've been listening to Create The Future, a podcast from The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering and Peanut and Crumb. This episode was presented by me, Roma Agrawal, and produced by Tess Davidson. To find out more, follow QEPrize on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Thanks for listening and see you next time.