The apparel industry needs to stop talking only to itself and steal ideas from automotive and defense. Electric Boat ditched physical submarine models for 3-D digital twins that simulate stress and performance. Apparel should do the same, but only if technology strengthens design, not weakens it.
The first thing is looking outside the apparel industry. The apparel industry tends to be an echo chamber. I mean, I've worked at several companies over the course of my career, and I see people here from all those companies, and we all work for different places now, but we're still in the apparel industry. So we still have the same ideas, but then you go into the automotive industry or you go into the defense industry, they're doing things differently. There's a place called Electric Boat Company, and they make submarines for the Department of Defense. They used to create a wooden model for every submarine before it was built. They're using this 3D software, this digital twin approach, to model their submarines. They don't build physical models anymore. Everything is done virtually. Not only for— they see what the appearance of the submarine is going to be, but they see what the material stress levels, how it performs in certain conditions under the ocean. They can model all this stuff. And I think that's the type of thinking that the apparel industry needs to, needs to address. And back to the, what I said before, keep a strong point of view on what good design is and design to that.
