New printing technology keeps European fashion up to pace
'Fast fashion' requires fast machinery and a EUREKA project has developed such printing technology to keep up with the rapid pace of new fashion trends. Since high-street brands such as Zara invented 'fast fashion', where designers imitate catwalk models at head-spinningly fast speeds, the retail industry has had to produce an increasing number of collections every season. 'The number of collections used to be four per season and now it is something like one collection per month,' says Alain Dunand, Vice-President of Imaje, the company responsible for leading the E!3285 FACTORY COPRITEX project. 'Zara replaces 50% of its collection every two weeks', adds Haje van Wezel, CEO Osiris Digital Printing, who worked alongside Imaje. This rapid turnover of clothes in shops has also led to increased pressure on textile printers, who must quickly supply patterned material to make attractive but affordable clothes. One problem that has arisen is the following: current printing technology is not adapted to increasingly fast fashion, with machines continuously being turned on and off to change the screens needed to print images in different colours. The French ink-jet printing specialist Imaje teamed up with Dutch printing start-up, Osiris Digital Printing, to develop a novel system of continuous ink-jet printing that could improve on the productivity of conventional screen printing. Starting in 2004 with €4.47 million of funding, Imaje developed ink-jet units - mechanical parts, electronics and software - in a system that can print multiple colour designs on to material in a single flow. Subsequently, these ink-jet units were installed at Osiris' factory in the Netherlands. Since then, Imaje and Osiris have been testing the system on various textiles and developing inks in different colours which can be used on everything from cotton to synthetics. The pair has also carried out studies into the cost savings that printers could make from using their system rather than conventional printing. 'Depending on the number of colours and the patterns, if you print 700 metres of textile the cost is equivalent to traditional printing methods, which means that anything below that - the current trend in the fashion industry - becomes [economically] interesting', says Mr Dunand. According to the two firms, designers will be able to produce more sophisticated designs using their system, and printers will be even more flexible for retailers. 'Time to market is getting shorter and shorter in Europe,' says Haje Van Wezel, CEO of Osiris Digital Printing. 'China cannot supply time to market like us. With our system, if you have a design, you could have a print on a piece of fabric within two hours, so you could walk out with a blouse within a few weeks'.
Countries
Netherlands