ERC Consolidator Grant MYCLOTH:
Sustainable Algorithmic Modeling of Personalized Garments

EU, ERC logos
funding agency
European Research Council
funding period
2021-2025
PI
Olga Sorkine-Hornung

short summary

Clothing is a fundamental and indispensable part of human existence, and dressing people has tremendous societal, economical, and environmental impact. The digital technological revolution has not yet achieved its full potential in the garment manufacturing and retail domain, where many of the processes remain essentially unchanged for a century. In addition, the "fast fashion" approach of selling large volumes of garments at very low prices and changing collections very frequently leads to significant waste of natural and human resources: according to recent research nearly 50% of all manufactured garments are imminently destined for landfill or incineration. A fundamental, radical change is required to the way clothes are designed, manufactured and delivered to consumers, generating value and attachment via quality instead of quantity and curbing toxic overproduction. The goal of this project is to bring transformative technological advances in geometric modeling and optimization of personalized, custom-fitted and fabricable garments in order to crucially support this change. To reach our goals, we must break away from traditional shape representations and modeling pipelines and develop a dedicated mathematical and algorithmic foundation for digital cloth and garment modeling. Our envisioned theoretical basis of the digital garment shape space will on the one hand facilitate a novel interactive modeling framework to support apparel designers in the creative task of template garment design in a reality-faithful manner, and on the other hand serve as the enabling foundation for automated, algorithmic garment personalization to perfectly fit any human body model. In stark contrast to current practice of standardized confection sizes, our framework will enable on-demand fabrication of custom-tailored clothing while being inclusive of the full diversity range of human shapes, and anticipate the proliferation of digital garment fabrication technology.

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 101003104, MYCLOTH).

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