Facts about fabrics

By: Anne Robinson

Amr8798@gmail.com

Fabric is one of the most important aspects of a design. It determines how the garment will feel, look, and withstand it's environment. Knowing about the different classifications and types of fabric can help you in your shopping. It also partly explains the costly price tags on many high end designer collections.

Fabric is made up of many interconnected fibers. This interconnection can occur from many processes, such as: knitting, weaving, chemical bonding, and felting.

Manufactured fibers have helped fashion come a long way by expanding the possibilities of fabric. Before manufactured fibers were available, people found certain fabrics hard to work with: wool shrunk, silk was delicate, linen wrinkled and was hard to wash.

In 1910, the United States began manufacturing rayon which was referred to as an "artificial silk". Nylon was invented in 1931, by American chemists, and was known as the "miracle fiber". And to throw in one more date for you history-interested readers, polyester hit the market in 1953.

There are five different types of natural fabrics: wool, cotton, silk, linen, and hemp, ramie, and jute. All of these are made from fibers taken from plants, animal coats, and silkworm cocoons. Here is a quick breakdown:

Wool-from animal coats

Cotton-from a cotton plant's seed pod

Silk-from a silkworm's cocoon

Linen-from the stalk of a plant

Hemp, ramie, jute-same as linen but processed a little differently

There are many more categories for manufactured or man-made fabrics. These fabrics start out as filaments that are made into fibers. Acrylic, lastex, nylon, rayon, polyester, and spandex are all examples of man-made fabrics.

The infamous 'Burn Test' can be done to determine if a fabric is natural, man-made, or a mix of the two. This test is common among fashion designers and fabric stores. During this test, a small piece of fabric is burned, depending on the way it burns, you can determine the probable make-up of the fabric. The burn test should be done carefully, realizing that all fabrics will catch fire.

Natural fibers are more expensive than manufactured or man-made fabrics because they are harder to come by, and can't be produced by a machine. High end designers gravitate toward using natural fabrics. After all, you pay for quality, so a sweater made from silk, that someone hand-picked off a silkworm cocoon, will undoubtedly be more expensive than one produced by a machine and manufactured fibers.