3D printing revolution in fashion industry

AD Printing Revolution in Fashion Industry Last week, I went to London Science museum, there was an exhibition of AD printing showing the completely new image of fashion in the coming 20 years. AD printing has been developing rapidly, now it is way more than printing plastic. It prints something that I cannot even believe: structural thing like house, complicated thing like gun, huge thing like rare plane and guess what, lively tissue. As AD printing becomes more mainstream, its applications are broadening (Rachel 2013).
It started to hit the roll of fashion, besides AD printed handbags, dresses, we can see AD printed high- heel shoes and bikinis in the latest fashion shows. As Stephanie (2014) mentioned, the mix of apparel and technology shows the innovative soul of fashion, the future of fashion is truly tricked out with AD printing technology. As this evolution continues we can expect to see a AD printing revolution in our fashion industry. In the following sections, this essay is going to illustrate the revolution in production, supply chain and design aspects.
Beginning with the first step of manufacture, production method in fashion field will e totally changed. According to some researches, 10% of all consumer products by the year 2025 will be made by the AD process. Richard (2013) discussed that since applications of the technology spread and prices decrease, more products will be manufactured at their location of purchase or consumption. Indeed, consumers will be printing their own clothing by 2020, according to inventor and futurist Ray Skuzzier (Tanya 2013). This implies that new household-level production will emerge.

On top of it, production will no longer includes labor force, capital, natural resources, UT only the printing machines, raw materials and programs which lead a huge reform. Based on the change of production method, the supply chain will eventually be modified. “The world will transform from a macro-manufactured supply chain to a micro-manufactured supply chain or what is known as distributed manufacturing” (Nick 2014). Whereas cars today are made by Just a few hundred factories around the world, they might one day be made in every metropolitan area.
The supply chain is going to be shortened as only machines and programs are involved, the whole supply chain may even only appear in our home. As the supply chain will undergo a makeover, certain categories of business will be eliminated. Countries will rather do domestic production than import since production will no longer require so much labors and places, shipping, delivery and inventory service will then go downhill. Before, the Internet technology has already overturned many traditional business models, so now the AD printing technology is going to revolute the fashion industry into a new era.
Nature of design will be adjusted due the altered producing methods. Customization of goods is more significant due to maker can simply adjust the aerogramme (Richard 2013). As AD printing can solve some practicable problems of creative products, so it actually encourages the creativity in meeting individuals’ need. The Job of designer will change as they have to know well about technology and design the products with programmer, or even, everyone can become a designer.
What Rachel (2013) mentioned is this kind of intersection of fashion and technology can give everyone access to creativity. People will be designing clothes for themselves which they know their size and style the best, so they can create personalized clothing. If you do not want to spend time on making your own AD printing programmer, you can simply buy it online as what we are doing for music file, consumers would pay a fee to download and print the renderings, Ideas may eventually never produce sportswear, but simply sell the format to print Jersey and sneaker.
Due to this, keen competition between the brands will be stronger, millions of designers are compete to produce a tremendous variety of objects. Some researchers start to doubt whether AD printing will be widely spread since customized products may be more expensive than traditional mass-produced goods, ND spend longer time as well (Ashley 2010). And actually, since the technology is improving and supply increased, according to the scale of economy, the price of machine and materials for printing are eventually dropping.
CNN did an experiment in 2013 that compared buying 20 items like phone case, spoon holder to the cost of printing them out directly. The result is, it took 25 hours to print all the objects and they saved up to $1926, depending on the quality of the comparable retail products. So we can definitely imagine all the time cost and price will be reducing by 2020. As what Nick (2014) pointed out, we are at the beginning of a revolution that will transform our society in ways we can’t even imagine.