The Development Of A Computer Aided Fashion Design System

As the largest exporter in textile and apparel industry, China has been proved to have the capability in supplying, designing, and manufacturing all kinds of the clothing in the competitive international market. However, the biggest challenge is that most of the garments exported from China are customized OEM, lack of our own brands, the price is rather low. On the other hand, the well known Kingdom of fashion, as France, Italy, leader of fashion design, their costumes with original design, high added value, though the export is much less, the profit is much higher.To meet the requirements of the international market, reversing the image of Chinese apparel products belonging to the middle and lower ends, it is necessary to increase the level of garment design, develop our clothing brands, improve product quality and accelerate the speed of our production and costume design. China's garment industry prevalent on the international fashion information, poor garments styles, poor color trends etc, which requires the establishment of relevant information center, a rapid and effective feedback system, lots of talent fashion designers. Moreover, the use of computer-aided design technology is also one of the possible tools to quickly satisfy the shorten market cycles demands.However, in our clothing design and production departments, computer technology has not been widely used. At abroad, apparel CAD has widely applied in fashion design and textile production. Some CAD suppliers, such as French company LECTRA, offers series of equipments covering from collection design to visual merchandising through production: Prototyping, cutting, Pattern design, Digital Textile printing etc. This software greatly shortened the production process, cut the waste of raw materials and improves products' quality. The application of computer technology will improve the efficiency of garment design and production; it plays a critical role in the significant increasing economic efficiency and expansion of textile exports. Nowadays, personalized products are becoming more and more popular, such as cell phones, household electrical appliances. Clothing is an important factor in individual expression; people hope to participate in the design process in order to design their own personalized garments. Personalized costume design is the mainstream of the future development. Due to the popularity of the Internet, some manufacturers in the field of shoes, men's shirts and sportswear have already made customized products possible. However, there are still many issues in the areas of personalized costume design, such as the variable styles, cost and how to quickly respond to the changing customer requirements.My research is based on the information of personalized clothing design, aims to establish some design rules from data of fashion styles and design elements collected by questionnaire. It is the foundation of the development of a compute aided fashion design system. The propose of this system is to meet the needs of personalized design, for what the customers can directly participate in the process of costume design. This system is based on the knowledge of fashion designers; it is an expert system in some ways. These design rules derived have certain reliability. In future, the system can also be used as an aided tool for the fashion designers to improve their design efficiency, in order to respond quickly to ever-changing market's demand. I used the decision tree method of machine learning to establish mathematical model, built a database of design rules from the data collected by the questionnaire. At present, this is only a simple model, but in the near future, it can be applied to the personalized female costume design.