Clothing Items Research Articles

Promoting sustainable practices: Exploring secondhand clothing consumption patterns and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in Japan

The rise of online flea markets in Japan has expanded access to secondhand products. Despite this expansion and the increasing recognition of the need for sustainable consumption, there remains a notable constraint on consumer acceptance of pre-owned items. Thus, this study emphasizes the utility of secondhand product usage in a context where consumer acceptance of pre-owned items is limited despite the recognized sustainability necessity. Additionally, it aims to investigate secondhand clothing-utilization patterns among users, estimate the environmental potential reduction, and assess their contribution to sustainable consumption. Conducted on users of the Japanese online flea market platform, Mercari (sellers: n = 13,325, buyers: n = 9985), the study quantified the potential reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by reusing secondhand clothing. Utilizing a survey, the key findings revealed distinct reuse characteristics for different items, confirming extended product lifespan even for those in poor condition. Moreover, secondhand products were used more frequently than new ones, and buyers exhibited less concern about potential damage. The displacement rate of secondhand for new clothing did not significantly decrease with worsening product condition. The study estimated a potential 9.6 thousand tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (ton-CO2eq) reduction under the assumption of 10 million secondhand clothing items replacing new ones. This study proposes the feasibility of utilizing secondhand items and their potential contribution to environmental conservation in consumption. Further, it establishes the theoretical foundation necessary to articulate the environmental significance of secondhand products. Simultaneously, it provides valuable insights into the broader implications of sustainable consumption practices.

Attention to brand labels affects, and is affected by, evaluations of product attractiveness

When considering whether to purchase consumer products, people consider both the items' attractiveness and their brand labels. Brands may affect the decision process through various mechanisms. For example, brand labels may provide direct support for their paired products, or they may indirectly affect choice outcomes by changing the way that people evaluate and compare their options. To examine these possibilities, we combined computational modeling with an eye-tracking experiment in which subjects made clothing choices with brand labels either present or absent. Subjects' choices were consistent with both the attractiveness of the clothing items and, to a smaller extent, the appeal of the brands. In line with the direct support mechanism, subjects who spent more time looking at the brands were more likely to choose the options with the preferred brands. When a clothing item was more attractive, subjects were more likely to look longer at the associated brand label, but not vice versa. In line with indirect mechanisms, in the presence of brand labels subjects exerted more caution and showed marginally less attentional bias in their choices. This research sheds light on the interplay between gaze and choice in decisions involving brand information, indicating that brands have both direct and indirect influences on choice.

Improving X-ray images of historically significant textiles

The availability of information as to the inner structures and condition of historically significant textiles and clothing items is essential for monitoring, preservation and restoration processes. Visual inspection is usually the initial step in identifying any damage, such as tearing or rotting, but it is not sufficient for examining of detail below the surface of the objects. Radiography Testing (RT) is a useful non-destructive approach, capable of revealing hidden damage to under-sewing layers, clothing design, and connections, providing crucial information for developing a conservation plan. However, due to the mainly low atomic number of the constituting elements of textile material and also the low thickness of such items, X-ray radiographs suffer from low imaging contrast, which is further compromised by noise due to the unavoidable detection of scattered X-rays, which introduces fogginess in the acquired radiographs. Using digital RT images as a starting point, two image processing approaches using histogram equalization and the more complex Automatic Color Enhancement (ACE) methods were applied to enhance the imaging contrast of the original radiographs. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of these methods in better identifying defects, hidden designs, motifs, and destructive regions within the inner layers of textiles. It was found that the ACE method produced better outcomes than the simpler histogram equalization approach. Results indicated that the ACE processed image could be favored over the simpler histogram equalization approach by its enhanced capability of targeted expansion of the scale for evaluation of deterioration. The conservators and radiographers were able to utilize the further and complementary capability towards improved object assessment, monitoring, and restoration procedures.

Women's Activities and the Preservation of Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Gorani Community

Research endeavors within the domain of intangible cultural heritage, conducted within the Gorani community, highlight, among various aspects, the involvement of women in creating and transmitting knowledge and skills, which are perceived by the Gorani populace as a particularly important component of the Gorani tradition. Women are ascribed a key role in preserving Gorani cultural heritage. This study examines the activities of women in the Gorani community within the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage framework. The research is focused on knowledge, skills, and practices carried out by women, which unfold continually within the Gorani community during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It primarily concerns the knowledge and skills of women manifested through the tradition of designing and wearing clothing items, especially those pieces that have become over time an indispensable part of women's ceremonial attire. The empirical data also encourages an examination of the role of women in shaping identity paradigms and symbols in the Gorani community, as well as their expression, transmission, and the assurance of the continuity of these practices. The analysis of women’s contribution to safeguarding the intangible cultural heritage of the Gorani community indicates that the preservation and protection of Gorani tradition, as understood and recognized by the participants in accordance with the UNESCO Convention defining heritage, are conditioned by the social, economic, and political circumstances shaping daily activities and everyday lives of the people in Gora, both within and beyond their native local environment. It is also obvious that Gorani’s interest in their own intangible cultural heritage is unmistakable, as demonstrated by social and cultural practices that would be impracticable without the existence of this heritage. The Gorani people's aspiration to safeguard their own cultural heritage is viewed in the context of its contribution to the preservation and continuity of the Gorani identity, namely the identity of the Gorani community, which holds minority status in the Republic of Serbia.

МЕТОДИЧНІ АСПЕКТИ ЕШЕЛОНУВАННЯ ПРЕДМЕТІВ РЕЧОВОГО ТА ПРОДОВОЛЬЧОГО ЗАБЕЗПЕЧЕННЯ У СКЛАДІ КОМПЛЕКСУ БОЙОВОГО ЕКІПІРУВАННЯ ВІЙСЬКОВОСЛУЖБОВЦЯ НАЦІОНАЛЬНОЇ ГВАРДІЇ УКРАЇНИ

The article is devoted to the analysis of the methodological provisions underlying the distribution of items of material and food support as part of the combat equipment complex of a serviceman of the National Guard of Ukraine by echelons. The main factors, indicators and criteria affecting the list of necessary items of clothing and food supply and their echeloning are determined. When performing specific assigned tasks, there is no need for servicemen to carry all the items of clothing specified in the supply standards, because the nature of the tasks, the conditions of their per-formance, the situation, the duration of stay and other parameters usually do not require the entire list of items. In addition, a number of items are seasonal items. The need to have food on hand is also de-termined by the nature, duration and conditions of the tasks to be performed. At the same time, both the lack of necessary items of clothing and food supply and excessive items will lead to a decrease in the effectiveness of the actions of a serviceman, may negatively affect his combat capability, endur-ance, health, and level of protection. It is shown that the task of echeloning the combat equipment complex (by elements of clothing and food supply) of a serviceman of the National Guard of Ukraine, depending on the nature of service and combat (combat) tasks, should be solved in two stages. At the first stage, it is necessary to form a list of items of material property and establish the need to have a set of food (elements of material and food supply) necessary for the period of performance of the as-signed service-combat (combat) task. The second stage is to distribute the items (elements) of clothing and food supply from the list of necessary items by echelons. It is advisable to distribute the necessary items of clothing and food to the servicemen of the Na-tional Guard of Ukraine in four echelons, which corresponds to the peculiarities of the service and combat (combat) tasks assigned to military units. The echelons are formed in accordance with the needs of servicemen for items of clothing and food sets in relation to the time of the task.

ВПЛИВ ПОГОДНИХ УМОВ НА РЕЗУЛЬТАТИ ЗАСТОСУВАННЯ КІНЕТИЧНОЇ ЗБРОЇ НЕСМЕРТЕЛЬНОЇ ДІЇ

Currently, when designing non-lethal kinetic weapons, the degree of protection of the target provided by clothing items, especially during cold seasons, is not considered. As a result of the loss of part of the energy of the impact element on deformation and destruction of clothing items, the effects on the target can significantly differ from those calculated for normal conditions and exceed permissible limits. This may lead to the failure of the firing task due to insufficient or excessive action of the impact element on the target. For the purpose of determining the influence of the degree of target protection by clothing items on the results of the action of the impact element, natural experimental studies were conducted using a pneumatic ballistic installation and a target simulator made of ballistic plasticine "Beschussmasse". The results yielded empirical dependencies of the penetration depth of the impact element from its velocity upon meeting the target for several protection variants of the object of weapon application by clothing items. These dependencies can be used during the design of non-lethal kinetic weapons, as well as for selecting models of such weapons from those available to perform firing tasks in specific temperature conditions. The work also draws attention to the need to consider the influence of the temperature of the powder on the burning rate and muzzle velocity of the impact element. To increase the effectiveness of the application of non-lethal kinetic weapons, it is proposed to develop a set of ammunition for such weapons with different masses of powder charge, which would correspond to the ambient temperature and take into account the degree of protection of the object of weapon application by clothing items and the dependency of the burning rate of the powder on the temperature. The direction for further research is to study the influence of the hardness of the impact element of the non-lethal kinetic weapons on the results of its action on the target.

Design of ergonomic hospital clothing based on the morphological transformation principle

The article presents materials on the design of ergonomic hospital clothing for people with temporarily limited mobility based on the principle of morphological transformation. In addition to existing methods of designing hospital clothing, a new principle of “dismemberment-recovery” has been proposed, in which an item of clothing is dismembered into a separate zone and restored to its original shape using a temporary Velcro fastener after medical procedures.

Transformer-Based Graph Neural Networks for Outfit Generation

Suggesting complementary clothing items to compose an outfit is a process of emerging interest, yet it involves a fine understanding of fashion trends and visual aesthetics. Previous works have mainly focused on recommendation by scoring visual appeal and representing garments as ordered sequences or as collections of pairwise-compatible items. This limits the full usage of relations among clothes. We attempt to bridge the gap between outfit recommendation and generation by leveraging a graph-based representation of items in a collection. The work carried out in this paper, tries to build a bridge between outfit recommendation and generation, by discovering new appealing outfits starting from a collection of pre-existing ones. We propose a transformer-based architecture, named TGNN, which exploits multi-headed self attention to capture relations between clothing items in a graph as a message passing step in Convolutional Graph Neural Networks. Specifically, starting from a seed, i.e. one or more garments, outfit generation is performed by iteratively choosing the garment that is most compatible with the previously chosen ones. Extensive experimentations are conducted with two different datasets, demonstrating the capability of the model to perform seeded outfit generation as well as obtaining state of the art results on compatibility estimation tasks.

To Study the Unique Characteristics of Cut Mark on Clothes with a Suspected Knife on the Basis of Microscopic Examination (Optical Comparator): A Case Report

Forensic physics plays a crucial role in cut mark examination, particularly in the analysis of tool marks, including those created by sharp objects like knives or other cutting instruments. The examination of cut marks involves the application of various principles and techniques from physics to understand the nature, characteristics, and potential source of the marks. In the State of Meghalaya, a numbers of cases are received to determine whether the cut marks on clothes are caused or cut by the suspected sharp object. This is predominantly occurring due to conflicts among individuals or groups often involving the use of hard objects or sharp weapons. The prevalence of such cases necessitates a closer examination of cut marks on clothing items as crucial forensic evidence. However, due to improper collection, preservation and packaging of exhibits has cause a potential hinder for the Forensic Expert's ability to provide a conclusive opinion. This study sheds light on the frequent occurrence of cases wherein cut marks on clothing serve as pivotal forensic evidence. Through a systematic scientific approach, this paper elucidates the significance of identifying and interpreting such distinctive features in forensic investigation. This study endeavours to empower forensic experts, enabling them to provide more reliable and insightful conclusions in cases involving cut mark examinations. The proposed improvements not only strengthen the forensic framework but also contribute to the effective resolution of cases involving attempted harm in this region.

Importance of Strategic Environmental Assessment (Sea) Process and Environmental Health Impact Assessment (Ehia) Process Towards Sustainable Climate Change And Control

Importance of Strategic Environmental Assessment (Sea) Process and Environmental Health Impact Assessment (Ehia) Process Towards Sustainable Climate Change And Control

Efficient Image Annotation and Caption System Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

This study aims to develop an annotation and image annotation system using the Fashion MNIST dataset, which consists of 70,000 grayscale images of ten clothing categories. The system uses a long short-term memory (LSTM) network to generate captions and a convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract image features. Performance evaluation metrics such as Precision, Recall, F1 score, BLEU score, METEOR score, CIDEr score, and ROUGE-L score are used where the accuracy of each clothing category is calculated to evaluate the performance of the model across different categories. Visual analysis of the generated captions is performed to gain insight into the effectiveness of the model and potential areas for improvement. The results indicate the model's success in classifying clothing items, as evidenced by its high accuracy on the test set. The qualitative study reveals the model's ability to identify different types of clothing by providing relevant captions, where the feature representation layer (normalization) plays a crucial role in transforming the detected features. to a flattened row which is then passed to a fully connected layer to learn the relationships and make final decisions with the output layer using a softmax activation function to assign probabilities to each image class, with the class with the highest probability selected as the predicted image class.

RFiD Threads® Technology for Circular Economy and Future Sustainability

Problem
 The fashion industry is the second most polluting industry globally [UNEP2021] - 85% of all textiles go to landfill each year [WEF2021]. There is growing demand for a shift to circular business models, with new concepts emerging such as “extended producer responsibility” [DEFRA2022], and policy announcements such as the EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles, mandating Digital Product Passports (DPP) [EC2023].The Ellen McArthur Foundation [EMF2021] has stated that “Sustainability concerns among customers are also projected to heighten”. This fact, coupled with the preparation of potential new regulatory instruments such as ‘Extended Producer Responsibility’ and other critical regulatory developments, is pushing the industry to consider different and more sustainable ways of producing textile products. A new technology-infrastructure to facilitate this transition is required, to support companiesand consumers access critical data on individual garments.
 150 billion items of clothing are produced annually worldwide [EMF2022], of which around 12.5 billion were tagged in 2022, using radiofrequency identification (RFID) technology [Checkpoint2022]. The use of RFID tags is increasing rapidly, with the market projected to reach $35.6 Billion by 2030 [MarketsAndMarkets2022].
 However, there are mainly two sustainability related problems holding back the full potential of RFID in the fashion industry:
 
 
 Weaknesses in current RFID-tag technologies: low robustness, non-washability, and attachment to temporary labels not integrated with the garment itself. 12.5 Billion RFID-tags were used last year in the fashion industry, mainly for inventory management [Checkpoint2022]. Those billions of paper/metal/label tags are usually removed immediately after sale and end up in landfill (which is very bad for the environment), because they are not washable or comfortable to wear with thegarment. For garments to be traceable throughout their lifecycle (enabling efficiencies and circular models), there is a need for integrating permanent 'Digital Passports' (e.g. RFID) in each textile-based product, and for easy access to data contained in these Digital Passports.
 
 Lack of data access, exchange and integration between supply chain actors: Currently, stakeholders use their own independent data management system/s. Therefore, the biggest challenges for efficient recycling/reuse of clothing is lack of access to data on fibre/material content. This makes it very difficult to implement automated systems for breaking up and separating used clothing items into their different fibre components.
 

A COMPREHENSIVE ANALYSIS OF MICROBIAL CONTAMINATION ON MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS ATTIRE AND DEVICES

This research aimed to evaluate the level of microbiological contamination on the hands, white coats, and cell phones of healthcare workers. The study was conducted as a cross-sectional study at the Pathology Department of Civil Hospital LUMHS Hyderabad between January 2021 and June 2021. A total of 130 participants were selected using convenience sampling and provided samples. Before sample collection, informed consent was obtained from all participants. Samples were randomly collected from the hands of healthcare professionals, white coats, and various cell phones. Data analysis was performed using SPSS 23.0. In our study, 86 (66.2%) were females and 44 (33.8%) were males. There were 46 (35.4%) cases age 20-30 years, 34 (26.2%) cases aged 31-40 years, 28 (21.5%) cases had age 41-50 years, and 22 (16.9%) cases had age >50 years. 62 (47.7%) samples were taken from lab coats, 43 (33.1%) from the hand of healthcare workers, and 25 (19.2%) from cell phones. The results of the lab coat contamination analysis revealed the following: Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus MRSA (6%), Escherichia coli (8%), Pseudomonas (2%), Klebsiella (3%), and Staphylococcus aureus (65%). Healthcare workers who were observed had a majority of MRSA (35.4%), Staphylococcus aureus (33.1%), Staphylococcus epidermidis (26.2%), and Pseudomonas (5%) on their hands. The most common bacteria found on mobile phones were MRSA (40%), followed by Staphylococcus aureus (18%), Staphylococcus epidermidis (34%), and pseudomonas (8%). This study demonstrates that a significant portion of the clothing and personal items used by healthcare professionals were tainted with different microorganisms that can cause nosocomial infections.

Projections of the Works of the Ukrainian Avant-Garde in the Design of Brands of Patriotic Accessories

The purpose of the article is to investigate the use of artistic graphic images of avant-garde works of fine art in the prints of patriotic brands’ accessories, in particular, scarves. The research methodology involves the use of a systematic approach, as well as a set of scientific methods: analytical, synthetic, art history, historical and cultural, semantic, which allow a comprehensive consideration of the given problem in order to obtain substantiated research results. The scientific novelty of the work consists in the actualisation of the modern use of images of artistic works of representatives of the Ukrainian avant-garde on printed images of such patriotic accessories as scarves, which are gaining popularity at the modern stage. Conclusions. Summarising, we note that the use of images of artistic paintings by Ukrainian avant-garde artists as prints on modern patriotic accessories, in particular scarves, the production of which is gaining increasing popularity in the wake of national-patriotic uplift, serves not only as a fashionable brand and a means of individual expression, but also as a form of representation of national cultural identity with the use of cultural artefacts, a means of popularising the artistic heritage of Ukrainian artists. The use of prints of author's works of art on items of modern clothing next to the more widespread tradition of embroidered clothing is a modern form of cultural and artistic, value representation of Ukrainian culture, which, in addition, strengthens the functions of symbolic meaning of modern society and actualising the achievements of national culture. Keywords: works of art of the Ukrainian avant-garde, clothing brand, accessories, scarves, patriotic clothing, print, national and cultural identity.

Cloth Interactive Transformer for Virtual Try-On

The 2D image-based virtual try-on has aroused increased interest from the multimedia and computer vision fields due to its enormous commercial value. Nevertheless, most existing image-based virtual try-on approaches directly combine the person-identity representation and the in-shop clothing items without taking their mutual correlations into consideration. Moreover, these methods are commonly established on pure convolutional neural networks (CNNs) architectures which are not simple to capture the long-range correlations among the input pixels. As a result, it generally results in inconsistent results. To alleviate these issues, in this article, we propose a novel two-stage cloth interactive transformer (CIT) method for the virtual try-on task. During the first stage, we design a CIT matching block, aiming at precisely capturing the long-range correlations between the cloth-agnostic person information and the in-shop cloth information. Consequently, it makes the warped in-shop clothing items look more natural in appearance. In the second stage, we put forth a CIT reasoning block for establishing global mutual interactive dependencies among person representation, the warped clothing item, and the corresponding warped cloth mask. The empirical results, based on mutual dependencies, demonstrate that the final try-on results are more realistic. Substantial empirical results on a public fashion dataset illustrate that the suggested CIT attains competitive virtual try-on performance.

History of the Study of Traditional Clothing of the Krasnoufim Mari (18th-20th Centuries)

The Krasnoufim Mari is a group of Ural Mari people, whose traditional clothing was marked by bright originality. They attracted the attention of travelers, researchers, local historians, ethnographers, art historians. The costume of the Ural Mari was repeatedly described by researchers of the 18th-19th centuries, and in the 20th-21st centuries it was the object of study of both Russian and Finnish ethnographers of different generations. The earliest evidences about the costume of the Ural Mari left by P.S. Pallas. In the 19th century the clothing of Mari people of Krasnoufimsky uyezd was described by G. Gorodskoy (V.N. Shishonko), S. Som-mier, D.P. Nikolsky. In the twentieth century the costume of this group of Mari ethnos was studied by T.E. Evseviev, S.N. Shitova, T.L. Molotova, as well as by A.O. Heikel and I. Lehtinen. In the 20th centure only one article devoted to the clothing of the Krasnoufim Mari people was published, and in the 21st century a number of richly illustrated articles and editions were published, the chapters of which were devoted to the costume of the Ural Mari people. Some of them are based on the materials collected in the Krasnoufim District of the Sverdlovsk Region. Three main bodies of sources on the topic were grouped by the researchers of the 18th-21st centuries: texts; collections of clothing items; photo-documents. In this article the history of formation of all three groups of sources is considered, as they were interrelated and represented often only different parts of a single research process.

Clothing deveopment through the integration of autistic children: inclusion through social action

In this study on inclusive fashion for autistic children, a visit to a children's clothing store and a custom shirt customization activity were conducted with two autistic children from Criciúma/SC, aiming to promote their self-esteem and autonomy. Social inclusion and acceptance of diversity are increasingly relevant, driving the search for strategies that ensure the full participation of everyone in society. The study aimed to understand how to assist autistic children in the selection and use of clothing, recognizing that their sensory characteristics and individual preferences are important considerations. The research was carried out in partnership with a local children's store, where autistic children were engaged in clothing-related activities. During the store visit, there was a noticeable increase in the children's interaction with different styles and textures of clothing, highlighting the importance of options that cater to their sensory needs. The results demonstrated that these experiences facilitated greater interaction and integration of children with the fashion world, enhancing their autonomy, self-esteem, and facilitating the process of choosing and wearing different clothes. Furthermore, customization stimulated the children's creativity and increased their involvement in producing personalized prints on their own clothing items. The need to develop strategies and actions to promote the inclusion and appreciation of autistic children in the fashion industry is emphasized. This extends beyond adapted clothing to fostering welcoming environments in stores and encouraging active participation in the process of creating their own clothing and prints.

Exploring U.S. retailers’ merchandising strategies for adaptive clothing: a focus on product assortment and pricing practices

ABSTRACT With society’s increasing call for more inclusivity in the fashion industry, adaptive clothing, designed for people with disabilities (PWD), has rapidly emerged as a critical and high-potential product category for U.S. retailers. By analysing thousands of clothing items in the market from 2018 to 2022 at the Stock Keeping Unit level, this study analysed U.S. retailers’ merchandising strategies for adaptive clothing. The logistic regression revealed that, statistically, adaptive clothing in the U.S. retail market looked more ‘boring’ and exhibited lower availability in several categories, including dresses, outerwear & suits, and underwear. Also, compared with nonadaptive ones, adaptive clothing statistically was more likely to be priced higher than the market average. The findings generated critical new knowledge about the business aspect of adaptive clothing by adding a valuable retailers’ perspective. The results also call for efforts to make adaptive clothing more diverse in product categories and financially affordable to PWD.

Ghost-Stitching American Politics

Ghost-Stitching American Politics

THE INFLUENCE OF THE PROCESS OF FRICTION - ABRASION ON THE AIR PERMEABILITY AND APPEARANCE OF CLASSIC COTTON-TYPE SOCKS

Socks are included in the group of everyday (indispensable) items of clothing. They should absolutely be comfortable, long-lasting and affordable. In this research were analyzed three types of socks that differ in raw material composition (mixture of Co, PA and Lycra fibers) and structure (loop density). All socks are made of knitwear in right-left interlacing. The basic characteristics of knitwear from feet, heels and toes were checked: longitudinal mass of yarn, density, loop length, surface mass, thickness. The samples were then subjected to measurements of air permeability and resistance to friction (abrasion) using methods according to ISO and EN ISO standards. After the friction process, the air permeability decreased thanks to the felting, i.e. rubbing the fibers in the structure of the knitwear, making it denser (regardless of the fact that protruding fibers fall out, they create piles of them). The visual assessment of appearance in the sock sections also changed with increasing number of friction cycles