What You Missed at Kornit Fashion Week

Voices of Kornit Fashion Week Los Angeles + Industry 4.0 Event from Kornit Digital on Vimeo.

AT THE KORNIT Fashion Week Los Angeles, Kornit presented an alternative vision for the future of fashion – one that answers the call for quality and unlimited expression, with speed to match the ecommerce age, and provides the safe and eco-responsible practices an increasingly conscientious consumer demands. Twenty three global fashion designers used Kornit’s digital design and production tools to bring their latest collections to life from concept to catwalk in mere days – not months, as has long been the norm.

“The Kornit Fashion Week was something we had not seen before in fashion for digital textile apparel,” says Michael Sanders, Digital Bias Consulting and Big Picture Editorial Advisory Board member.

A broad array of thought leaders came together to discuss the trends driving change and opportunity in fashion and textile production. Successful Kornit users, technology and materials innovators, business visionaries, fashion designers, experienced industry thought leaders and influencers, and Kornit executives shared the opportunities to create new business models and grow in the digital textile printing space. Sessions covered:

• Adopting an on-demand business model – The “sell first, then produce” paradigm
• Shortening time to market through digitization – and eliminating supply chain concerns
• Offering greater variety with minimal planning or investment – for mass production and mass customization alike
• State-of-the-art digital print capabilities, which now incorporate retail-quality screen, dye sublimation, threadless embroidery, vinyl heat transfer, neon, and white-on-black effects to a single, eco-friendly production system
• A global fulfillment network providing localized fulfillment, democratizing access to digital production while creating new sales channels for print service providers
• Capturing the ecommerce wave to create sales opportunities through virtual showrooms, online design tools, social selling, and data-driven engagement with new markets

DenimFWD also unveiled its new EcoFactory production prototype, eliminating dirty and wasteful denim production processes in favor of streamlined, on-demand, digitized production techniques, empowering producers to establish quick, profitable fulfillment even in regions as costly and highly-regulated as Southern California.

“The trip to Denim FWD was a game changer,” says Sanders. “Coming from someone who has mill experience, this is what the digital apparel community needs to see. Many people don’t understand that after the fabric is printed it needs to be finished to obtain the right looks to be valid in apparel. This means washing and laser engraving and much more done in the finishing of garments.”

Among other state-of-the-art innovations, DenimFWD’s production floor showcased Kornit Atlas Max and Kornit Presto Max, single-step systems for direct-to-garment and direct-to-fabric production on demand, respectively.

“There’s so much that can be done with digital textile printing,” says Sanders. “It has a lot to do with how apparel printing is done and using more consumable and environmentally correct ways of manufacturing, which is needed to change the world’s carbon footprint.”

View 16 photos of the fashion shows using digital textile printing here.