Developing a new approach on customized clothing considering fit and design parameters

With the increasing demand of consumers and with the support of technological developments, customization has been a new trend in various fields. For a wide-scale customization, apparel products need to satisfy not only each individual?s taste, but also must fit an individual?s unique body measurements. The first phase of this research included an interview study with fashion designers and a few brand-named companies? managers. Subsequently, a survey was realized with the aim of understanding consumers? tendency to fit and design customization. The framework of the second research phase was defined to explore the most common female body silhouettes and to develop a rapid and convenient method to classify female figures. Few body dimensions were chosen as input parameters of the algorithm, which was developed to identify the front silhouettes. Two test groups were created for body measurement extraction. Firstly, 80 participants from a German university were measured by Human Solutions Vitus Smart XXL body scanner, secondly, 90 participants from the universities in Izmir/Turkey were measured by traditional anthropometric methods. For each participant, results of the automatic calculation method and visual assessments of the referees were evaluated in pairs for agreement levels. A web-based application, which is a PHP based evaluation and analysis system was designed to identify body silhouettes with the proposed algorithm. The third phase of the study aimed to compare the fitting of standard and m-t-m garments, which were prepared by choosing the most typical body silhouettes among the data set in the previous phase of the study. Four referees were chosen to assess the fit of m-t-m and standard size garments subjectively based on the given criteria. Fitting results were compared statistically for the identification of best fit.