Fabric Performance in Clothing and Clothing Manufacture

After the performance of clothing fabric in use has been satisfied to some extent, consumers seek better-quality, that is, more comfortable, fabrics. Fabric performance in relation to ‘better fitting to the human body’ is an essential requirement of clothing materials. From the mechanical-comfort viewpoint, textile producers and consumers have evaluated this kind of fabric performance by a subjective method, called handle judgement. For the engineering design of the fabric performance with regard to fabric handle, this subjective method must be analysed to explain what the fabric handle is and how it is judged. In this paper, recent developments in the analysis and standardization of fabric handle, mainly used by experts in textile mills, are first introduced, and then the development of the objective-evaluation system of fabric handle based on fundamental fabric mechanical properties is described. This is a type of expert system, and the translation software from the fabric mechanical data to handle has ...