Objective Evaluation of the Quality of Ladies' Garment Fabrics

Abstract

Ladies' garments differ from men's wear in that they come in a vast variety of designs and make use of fabrics with greatly varying mechanical properties to compose various silhouettes. Accordingly, it is much more difficult to perform objective fabric quality evaluations for ladies' garments than for men's wear. Hence, quality evaluations have been generally based on the experiences of garment designers and apparel makers. Women's apparel is strongly influenced by trends in color, pattern, fashion and so on, and there are various appraisal standards for the quality of fabrics. Therefore, the first objective of this research was to analyze the results of subjective fabric material evaluations conducted by experts in women's apparel fabric manufacturing, retail, design, etc., and to clarify those appraisal standards. Next, ladies' garment fabrics were divided into three silhouette types - tailored type, drape type, and anti-drape (Hari) type - based on the basic mechanical properties of each fabric. For each silhouette type, we then derived a method for objectively evaluating the quality of fabrics, that is to say the Total Hand Value (THV), which utilizes the fabrics' basic mechanical properties. At the same time, we also used the data evaluation of the objective quality evaluation system to validate these methods as effective methods for predicting the quality of ladies' garment fabrics.