A team of researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Adobe has developed a software system that breaks down fashion design into modules – essentially, smaller building blocks – by allowing users to draw, plan, and visualise each element of a clothing item. The tool turns fashion ideas into a blueprint that outlines how to assemble each component into reconfigurable clothing, such as a pair of pants that can be transformed into a dress.
With ‘Refashion’, users simply draw shapes and place them together to develop an outline for adaptable fashion pieces. It’s a visual diagram that shows how to cut garments, providing a straightforward way to design things such as a shirt with an attachable hood for rainy days. One could also create a skirt that can then be reconfigured into a dress for a formal dinner, or maternity wear that fits during different stages of pregnancy.
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‘We wanted to create garments that consider reuse from the start,’ said PhD student Rebecca Lin in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) PhD student. ‘Most clothes you buy today are static, and are discarded when you no longer want them. Refashion instead makes the most of our garments by helping us design items that can be easily resized, repaired, or restyled into different outfits.’
The researchers conducted a preliminary user study where both designers and novices explored Refashion and were able to create garment prototypes. Participants assembled pieces such as an asymmetric top that could be extended into a jumpsuit, or remade into a formal dress, often within 30 minutes. These results suggest that Refashion has the potential to make prototyping garments more approachable and efficient. But what features might contribute to this ease of use?
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Its interface first presents a simple grid in its Pattern Editor mode, where users can connect dots to outline the boundaries of a clothing item. It’s essentially drawing rectangular panels and specifying how different modules will connect to each other.
Users can customise the shape of each component, create a straight design for garments (which might be useful for less form-fitting items, such as chinos) or perhaps tinkering with one of Refashion’s templates. A user can edit pre-designed blueprints for things like a T-shirt, fitted blouse, or trousers.
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Another, more creative route is to change the design of individual modules. One can choose the ‘pleat’ feature to fold a garment over itself, similar to an accordion, for starters. It’s a useful way to design something such as a maxi dress. The ‘gather’ option adds an artsy flourish, where a garment is crumpled together to create puffy skirts or sleeves.
While it might seem that each of these components needs to be sewn together, Refashion enables users to connect garments through more flexible, efficient means. Edges can be seamed together via double-sided connectors such as metal snaps (like the buttons used to close a denim jacket) or Velcro dots. A user could also fasten them in pins called brads, which have a pointed side that they stick through a hole and split into two ‘legs’ to attach to another surface; it’s a handy way to secure, say, a picture on a poster board. Both connective methods make it easy to reconfigure modules, should they be damaged or a ‘fit check’ calls for a new look.
As a user designs their clothing piece, the system automatically creates a simplified diagram of how it can be assembled. The pattern is divided into numbered blocks, which is dragged onto different parts of a 2D mannequin to specify the position of each component. The user can then simulate how their sustainable clothing will look on 3D models of a range of body types (one can also upload a model).
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Finally, a digital blueprint for sustainable clothing can extend, shorten, or combine with other pieces. Thanks to Refashion, a new piece could be emblematic of a potential shift in fashion: instead of buying new clothes every time we want a new outfit, we can simply reconfigure existing ones.
‘Rebecca’s work is at an exciting intersection between computation and art, craft and design,’ said MIT EECS professor Erik Demaine. ‘I’m excited to see how Refashion can make custom fashion design accessible to the wearer, while also making clothes more reusable and sustainable.’
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While Refashion presents a greener vision for the future of fashion, the researchers note that they’re actively improving the system. They intend to revise the interface to support more durable items, stepping beyond standard prototyping fabrics. The CSAIL-Adobe team may also evaluate whether their system can use as few materials as possible to minimise waste, and whether it can help ‘remix’ old store-bought outfits.
Lin also plans to develop new computational tools that help designers create unique, personalised outfits using colours and textures. She’s exploring how to design clothing by patchwork – essentially, cutting out small pieces from materials such as decorative fabrics, recycled denim and crochet blocks, and assembling them into a larger item.
‘This is a great example of how computer-aided design can also be key in supporting more sustainable practices in the fashion industry,’ said Adrien Bousseau, a senior researcher at Inria Centre at Université Côte d’Azur who wasn’t involved in the paper. ‘By promoting garment alteration from the ground up, they developed a novel design interface and accompanying optimisation algorithm that helps designers create garments that can undergo a longer lifetime through reconfiguration. While sustainability often imposes additional constraints on industrial production, I am confident that research like [this] will empower designers in innovating despite these constraints.’
The research has been published in the Proceedings of the 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.