How Technology will Reform Clothing Quality: Guest Post by 13-year-old India Hyde

I attended Descience’s Fashion 4WRD event on September 17, 2015, and found it very inspiring and thought provoking. One of the questions they asked was ‘What do you think fashion will be in the future?’ I thought about this for a while and now I finally know my answer. The goal for fashion recently has been to make everything faster and cheaper. Our clothing has been losing quality because of this. I hope that fashion can utilize the tools that technology provides us to create quality clothing without losing speed. During the Fashion 4WRD event one of the panelists said that we should make one million garments for one million people instead of one garment for one million people. Every body is different, and every body has unique needs. This struck me as being extremely important.

An important idea is that everyone gets the clothing that they need. Recently more people have been designing clothing for people with certain disabilities. Some people need accommodations in their clothing and it is important to provide them. This presents a problem; if many people need different accommodations how are we going to make clothes for everyone?

I think technology will play an important role in fixing this problem. People in a factory alone cannot solve this, but if they had technological help they might be able to produce custom clothing for everybody. Hopefully technology will enable us to reach a new level of quality in which clothing will be specialized for each person.

Additionally, most clothes that lack quality come from large factories. Most of these factories treat their workers badly and exploit child labor. By bringing back quality we might be able to both create better clothes and stop factories from exploiting their workers. If technology does more of the work, maybe we will also be able to create factories that do not need to use child labor or keep their workers in awful conditions.

Fashion 4WRD’s helped me realize that my generation will decide the future. It is very important that kids be prepared to decide the future of technology. Because whatever kids want the future of technology to be is what it will be. I want my generation to think about what they see in the future so they are ready to lead us there. Even if you are not a kid I think it is important for everyone to think about what they want the future to be. So ask yourself ‘What do you want the future to be like?’

Check out photos, speaker bios, and Future Fashion Lab Exhibitors from Fashion 4WRD here.

Photo Courtesy of MIT Enterprise Forum Cambridge