Digitalization of garment in the context of circular economy

Abstract

One of the principles of the circular economy is to recycle used or unused materials, in order to reuse them in the creation of new objects or the restoration of old ones. But due to the fragility, some of these materials, such as old textiles and clothing, are quite difficult to handle. This study presents a completely digital method with the help of which two pieces of clothing of different ages and physical properties, have been restored and stylized; the two pieces are made up of a traditional Romanian women’s shirt about 100 years old and a modern sports t-shirt. For the application of the principles of the circular economy, the restoration-stylization processes of the pieces were based on the material and ornaments collected digitally from a series of old Romanian towels, which are currently no longer used. For this we considered the creation of 3D models of all the materials considered by the method of photogrammetry in Agisoft Metashape 1.6.2 Professional Edition and their processing in MeshLab 2020.2, as well as the vectorization of traditional motifs in ArcGis 10.6. Such an approach limits to the minimum the numbers of attempts that the restores have at their disposal while also allowing the obtaining, storage and transmission of information about traditional textiles, aimed at capturing the imagination of modern artists and designers to restore them for future generations.