Exploring The Innovation Direction Of Sewing Equipment From The Transformation Of Footwear And Apparel Technology

"Clothing, food, housing, and transportation" are the necessities of life that accompany people 24 hours a day. Therefore, their appearance, craftsmanship, and other aspects will inevitably change with the updating of people's values ​​and lifestyles. On the one hand, the post-epidemic era and the sweeping technological revolution have given people a new understanding and requirements for clothing and apparel, such as greater comfort, functional expression, and lower purchase prices. These trends will undoubtedly put forward new requirements for the development of ready-to-wear garments, thereby triggering changes in universal clothing equipment. On the other hand, single-piece customization and high-end brands, in order to highlight their brand and product advantages, have higher requirements for the craft details, raising new issues for improving and upgrading special equipment in the industry.

Taking the evolution of shoes, especially sport shoes, as an example, in the past, to adapt to the three-dimensional shape of the foot, sports shoes were constructed by sewing small pieces of fabric together to form a three-dimensional shoe surface. This method not only increased the processing time but also raised labor costs due to the length of the sewing process. However, nowadays, most sports shoes use a three-dimensional weaving technology to create a shoe surface, and the sewing process has been greatly reduced or even eliminated. Meanwhile, other techniques, such as hot pressing, high-frequency, printing, and embroidery are being added to enhance the shoe surface patterns. The transition from seam-bonded shoe surfaces to woven three-dimensional surfaces is a continuous iterative evolution of the demand and function of the equipment.

Taking the cutting bed on the cutting end as an example, laser cutting equipment can perform single-piece cutting depending on the direction and shape of the pattern edge line on the fabric, making the cut edge smooth and free of fluff. This allows for more accurate and beautiful stitching in subsequent specific sewing processes, making it ideal for the customization of sports clothing and high-end brand production. Customization sportswear requires exquisite cutting around the edge of the garment to match the pattern shape, while highly endeavored fashion brands can achieve identical or symmetrical effects on their plaid and pattern positioning by using laser cutting tools equipped with cameras that recognize fabric patterns and stripes. However, this also depends on the high-quality printing and pattern designs of the front-end digital printing of fabrics.

After secondary development, laser cutting equipment has been put into practical production. Therefore, equipment enterprises that serve clothing production, should not only focus on the trend of clothing products but also consciously stand at the forefront of clothing research and development, observe the trend of clothing, examine the matching degree between their own products and the evolution of clothing functionality, and keep up with the evolution of products. They also should understand the needs of clothing production companies with high functional requirements, such as high-end outdoor, sports, and international brand processing sites, provide solutions, and use their high dimensionality and research and development supply guarantee capabilities to meet the relatively low-dimensional needs of ordinary production companies with ease.