Epson partners with designers for sustainable fashion
Epson introduced a partnership with famend Japanese clothier Yuima Nakazato and his eponymous model at Paris Haute Couture Style Week Spring-Summer season 2023 to unveil creations which can be each beautiful and sustainable. Along with utilising Epson’s digital textile printing to breed his distinctive and artistic worldview, Yuima Nakazato realised a few of its creations with the assistance of a brand new, extra sustainable and doubtlessly industry-transforming textile manufacturing course of.
Epson’s dry fiber expertise, which is already used commercially to recycle workplace paper and which requires just about no water, has been tailored to supply printable non-woven material from used clothes. The brand new material manufacturing course of was revealed in Paris as a part of a three-year collaboration between Epson and Yuima Nakazato and was used within the creation of things for the primary time in the course of the latter’s runway present on the Palais de Tokyo on January 25, 2023.
The collaboration between Epson and Yuima Nakazato builds on the success of the corporate’s printing assist for his couture and evolves the extent of his creations to allow the low-impact manufacturing of high-quality customized clothes. Each Epson and Yuima Nakazato are eager to lift consciousness of the water and materials waste related to extra manufacturing. The Paris Present illustrates how switching to digital textile printing utilizing extra environmentally pleasant pigment inks provides the style {industry} a extra sustainable and fewer wasteful technique of textile printing.
The material taken to create the most recent Yuima Nakazato trend line was derived from materials from used clothes sourced from Africa, the vacation spot for a lot of discarded clothes from elsewhere on the planet. Nakazato visited Kenya the place he collected round 150 kg of waste garment materials destined for the garments mountain of discarded textiles he encountered there. Epson then utilized its dry fiber course of to supply over 50-m of recent re-fiberised non-woven material, a few of which was used for printing with pigment inks with Epson’s Monna Lisa digital printing expertise.
Hitoshi Igarashi, printing options division, Epson, defined the significance of the expertise, mentioned, “Though in its early levels, Epson believes its dry fiber expertise mixed with pigment ink digital printing may provide the style {industry} a way more sustainable future, considerably decreasing water use whereas permitting designers the liberty to completely categorical their creativity. Epson’s Environmental Imaginative and prescient is dedicated to contributing to a round financial system, and this growth could possibly be one step in direction of attaining this. Dry fiber expertise utilized to the style {industry} provides the potential of producing materials for brand spanking new garments which have been recycled from used clothes.”
In a trial of distributed printing for venue ornament, Epson inkjet printers in Japan and France with distant assist from Epson engineers have been used to create decorations within the venue area. Each Epson and Yuima Nakazato intend to proceed exploring the chances for contributing to a extra sustainable trend {industry}.
