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Cotton may be America's favorite apparel fiber, but few are the consumers who would associate it with luxury. That's a perception Eike S. Heymer, Director, Fabric Development and Research Implementation at Cotton Incorporated, is working hard to change.
In order to effectively integrate its marketing and research directions, Cotton Incorporated has identified a focused group of “product initiatives.” The initiatives address specific markets for cotton through a collaborative, multidisciplinary process that involves staff from every division of the company. One such program, the Womenswear Initiative, was designed to assess the needs of the womenswear market and implement strategies to fulfill them, with the goal of increasing the overall market share for 100% cotton and cotton rich blends.
"Women's wear is an area of concentration for Fabric Development," Heymer, a member of the Womenswear Initiative team, asserts. He believes that his work will help women see the fashion potential of cotton beyond denim and other casual fabrics.
"Women want fabrics with a certain kind of look, hand and drape," Heymer explains. "100% cotton can offer the kind of attributes that are sought for high fashion, but if we want to approximate the dressier fabrics that are now popular, we have to play with blends. In this way, we can combine the best of both worlds -- the comfort of cotton and the aesthetics of natural luxury fibers."
Wool is proving to be an excellent fiber for blending, and Heymer discovered it doesn't take much in combination with cotton to make a big difference in the final product. "The idea behind this concept is that the fabrics have to be performance oriented and washable," he notes. "By using as little as 20% wool, we were able to impart the thermal properties, durability and most importantly, the aesthetics of wool. And the fabrics are machine washable, soft and absorbent because of the high cotton content. We took the 'itch' out of a fabric that looks just like wool."
These mechanically blended fabrics offer additional fashion possibilities. "Since wool picks up acid dyes and cotton doesn't, many of the mills that have been running these fabrics were able to offer cross dyeing effects, especially for upscale melange looks," Heymer reports.
Taking luxury to the next step, Heymer and his Fabric Development team have also been working with cashmere. "Because of the high price, we are only using 5 to 15% cashmere in these blends, but you can definitely detect its presence in the resulting fabrics," he maintains. "It lends both softness as well as a certain mystique. We think that if consumers see cashmere on the label, they will certainly be willing to pay more."
Cotton has also been successfully blended with silk, but this fiber presented a particular challenge. The approach had to be a little different than that taken with wool blends. "When we tried mechanical blending, it didn't give us the luster and hand we were looking for," Heymer relates. "So we plied together a cotton yarn with a silk filament. By wrapping the silk filament on the outside, around the cotton yarn, the filament itself would give us much more luster on the surface of the fabric." With an average of 70% cotton, the fabrics offer a look very similar to silk that is much easier to care for and considerably less expensive than pure silk. "And since cotton breathes better than silk, these fabrics are a natural for warm weather," Heymer adds.
These blends, of course, are only one small part of what the Fabric Development team at Cotton Incorporated offers the industry. Designers can look through over 4,000 fabrics for inspiration, many of which are knitted on site at Cotton Incorporated’s headquarters, while wovens are produced on state-of-the-art, off-site looms. "We work closely with Fashion Marketing and Global Product Marketing in developing fabric ideas," Heymer notes. "We all travel around the country and around the world, so we know what the mills are doing and what the stores are showing."
The next concern is how these fabrics can be manufactured in "real-life" conditions, something Heymer is more than familiar with, having spent 14 years working at several major U.S. mills before joining Cotton Incorporated 21 years ago. "The capabilities of particular mills must be kept in mind while doing this work," he emphasizes. "For example, for luxury blends, how do you bring other fibers into a cotton mill without contaminating everything? In the case of silk, for instance, these plied yarns are easier to work with than mechanical blends. Wool blends are a bit more of a challenge. We help mills reset their equipment to accommodate blended yarns."
As for sourcing yarns, "we create yarns with the help of the Fiber Processing team at Cotton Incorporated for long-range development. We also evaluate commercially available yarns that allow us to develop fabrics almost overnight," Heymer reports.
When put into production, the resulting fashion fabrics for the women's market are generally produced in shorter runs, "sometimes as small as 5000 yards," which allow mills to offer a greater variety of fabrics, but not without certain difficulties. "For wovens, we try to predict the current loom situation to see if a particular fabrication can be adapted without modification," Heymer explains. "Perhaps we take out a few ends, or use a slightly heavier filling yarn. Sometimes there will be hundreds of fabrics for which we are trying to find a common denominator that will help increase productivity." A similar approach is taken in engineering knits, with the goal of minimizing major changes in widths or weights among several fabrics for any particular mill.
This more comprehensive approach keeps costs down, making these ideas more attractive to the marketplace. Thus, the mission of Cotton Incorporated, to increase the consumption and profitability of cotton is kept clearly focused on womenswear where we the see the greatest opportunity for growth.
"These looks could trickle down from the high-end to the mass market level if the blends are adapted properly," Heymer observes. "That's when cotton's market share can really grow." |
