This is the transcript of a talk given at PI Apparel in Amsterdam by Rickard Lindqvist. You can watch the session in full here.
I hope I’ll be able to bring a bit of punk into this conference here. You know, this talk. And what do you see? Right. Is this is you see is a tape tape recording of Dead Kennedys. I think this is one mid-eighties home taping is killing a record industry profits.
We left this site blank so that you can help. I think that’s brilliant. Part of this going to be about the the similarities between the music industry and the fashion industry and what we can learn from the from the music industry. But the the title of this talk here, this presentation is, as you might have read, Open Source Design Development How free access to digital design information will Transform the fashion Industry.
And I don’t know exactly how they will transform it, but there are some sort of qualified guesses or theories or thoughts I have about it that I will share with you here. It could also be called Listen to the Music. Or if we want to be a bit more punk and of fashion brands areas, then I my American linguist, I have a background as a tailor, a designer, a researcher at the Swedish School of Textile.
I worked in the industry sort of stretching from couture and bespoke tailoring to sportswear. I co co-created the label at the COC in 2016, sort of benchmarking the setup of how we can use work with digital 3D visualizations for fashion. Today, I operate a small factory, a dig, a physical factory in Sweden. We produce digital and physical garments and so we do all our product development in close 3D and the visualizations and animations.
We use close 3D also for all our production, all the grading, all the layout planning, everything is done in the same system. Today. We still have a and a traditional to a dickhead software, but I haven’t used it for two months to be honest. And so we are a team of seven people for working in the physical production and three sort of in, in digital and, and management and a industry is now.
Yeah, this is another example. This is another example of dig a physical things this, this is the thing we did for PUMA innovation a few years ago. It’s it’s sort of the concept for whom as first E sport collection you know companies like Puma, they they profit on selling merch. And the kids today, they don’t look at football and longer they look at e-sports, so they want to sell t shirts to the kids playing.
But there’s no sound coming out. And I don’t know if that’s intentional. We can live without the sound, but it’s quite a fantastic project for me to to work with where we because we combine the physical and the digital and then after these conceptual development sketches and this sort of became the first sponsored E Sports team e-sport team that Puma sponsored.
And, and basically this was a this was a remake of Puma’s T seven Tracksuit that was really comfortable to sit down and we a industry A is for it’s good to have a company starting with eight because we always get first had the first it first in line but it’s also since I’ve before had this fashion brand called attack and two years ago we divide the car into two parts so at the COC still exist as a brand, but the in-house production that we’re doing and all the consultancies I was carrying out is now done under the label a industry.
Just to give you some background, without the car, we sort of pioneered the sort of dig a physical things. We started on the car in 2016 and me and Jimmy together carried on then for I think four years and is one one of my favorite things we did. This is a hologram box showcasing 3D garments in scale. 1 to 1 in the physical room.
And so we’re mixing 19th century mirroring technology with modern 3D visualizations.
It is better with sound, isn’t it? We speed through that a bit. So. Yeah. And without Takac we were sort of pioneers in I think it’s 2016 starting actually settling arguments on rendered images because we were a bit we found out about clones, the 3D technology back then, and we were a bit kind of shocked that we couldn’t find an example of brands actually selling garments based on rendered images.
So suddenly on, we started an independent fashion brand, mainly with a motivation that if we start small, we can do anything because we can’t really fail or we can fail, but we want to affect us so much. If you don’t best look someone, it. So we did that and we elaborated a lot with different possibilities. We set up online fitting rooms where you could take we tested different try out for online fitting and we did a lot of animations and we went to paper apparel twice to speak and but the most important thing we did with other COC for what I’m speaking about here today is what we call shareware, meaning that every time when we released a new style for sale, we also released the to day pattern and the 3D model for free downloading because frankly, I mean, the whole fashion industry is built on copying, everyone is copying each other. So we have thought like if anyone want to copy what we do, I rather see and then doing good copy than a bad copy.
And then they don’t have to spend weeks for, I don’t know, tracing that pattern and everything. And this also created quite a following for us. Right. And, and if you downloaded a pattern, you got a cloud file, you got a dxf file, and you got a PDF file as well to print out. So we got a very nice follow some of homeschoolers, very cute people putting up pictures on Instagram of things that they did.
But, but the important thing for me, or like for the process of what I’m doing was that’s what happened, that we had a we had a client, a guy living in Luxembourg buying this green shirt and he downloaded clothes and our downloaded I want to play I guess he downloaded clothes, but he downloaded the garment and sort of redesigned it quite radically.
And then he came back to me saying that, Hey, I’ll redesign that shirt. I have some short fabrics. Can I send that over to you? Because I heard that you have your in-house manufacturing and use your factory as my 3D printing service for this. And I was like, Yes, sure, that’s brilliant. So we did him a couple of shirts and then we used his design for a new at the backdrop, and then suddenly there I was not, I think like what will happen with fashion brands if information is available for anyone?
And what about music then why? Why did I start with this punk type since. Yeah, that is since the music industry has already gone through what we are talking about here today. I don’t know. Has any of you gone shopping records now? All are being in Amsterdam. Find out the local Virgin Megastores. No, you haven’t, because they are not any longer.
Everyone is. We’re consuming our music through streamed media and all. So that’s a really game changer. And that change is not only for us as consumers, it’s also for artists and musicians. If your I can, I can create a song today, probably just downloading an app on my phone and in 10 minutes play a song. It, it will probably sound as shit, but but it would be a unique new tune that probably no one ever heard.
So, you know, it’s really, really changed the whole setup. And so then it’s everything from creation to distribution. And I learned that in Sweden, on Spotify, the majority of everything that is streamed is independent music. Now, the music that has been created and produced without any connection to any major record labels and record labels that used to be the main thing on the record.
You see here the the record label that is printed larger than the artist and and when I was buying records in the nineties, I was quite nerdy. But when I was buying records, now I moved to London only to buy records because I couldn’t find them in Sweden. The records I wanted then I always knew which record label the music.
The artist I was listening to was signed on. Who knows that today? And I know. And why was it like this? That was since it was super expensive to record and distribute music. This is supposed to have been the world’s most expensive recording studio. At least when I Googled the world’s most expensive recording studio, it was admits number one.
And it looks really extensive. But we’re going to listen to a very wise man being interviewed 20 years ago is David Bowie in Swedish television about the Internet and the development of the music industry. And now I see if from ThoughtWorks, I think that we’re moving into a time when music will be fully available in the same way that water or electricity is from the Internet.
When brought and becomes the order of the day everywhere, which won’t be that long. It can only be a few years away. When that finally happens, it will. I think it will obliterate the idea of the record industry at the moment, change it, and I think the emphasis on what music is to our lives will change some of the character, the nature of it.
And I think that artists themselves will find that they have to fall back on performance to provide them with incomes, because I don’t think the music will make them any. Yeah, it’s quite right. It was quite right. And imagine that he is talking about the fashion industry and he’s saying that a fashion I hear was he heard her have written down that yeah I think that we’re moving into music la la la.
And and if it would be fashion this would be I think that we’re moving into a time when fashion designs will be fully available in the same way as water or electricity from the Internet, and it will only obliterate. Right. The idea of the fashion industry and change it. And I think the emphasis of fashion is to our lives will change the character and the nature of it.
And this could sound a bit sad, and I guess it is in a way, because with change, things change and we some some things get lost. And I kind of I kind of miss those record stores. But on the other hand, I think it’s fantastic with the accessibility to music, but also music is something else to us today.
But this to me, may maybe it’s since I’m older, but I think I think it’s not only that and and so then let let’s have a look at what it looked like then when 20 years ago then we even more than that we went through all these different hardware, the music industry. And in two yes, 2000 we already had the technique for music streaming that I always talking about here.
Of course it wasn’t mainstream, but the technique was there. So then what kind of technique do we have today in the fashion industry and one thing that I’m going to sort of base this is on, and I use Cloe so 3D for my designs and Chlo released one year ago, what are they called this closet connect for an open platform online where users could share their designs or sell them or just put them up for show.
Here you can find then. But I think it’s right now, I think it’s about 700 designs that people agreed that you can use these for physical production. And, you know, that doesn’t really matter if they agreed to that as copyright protection for patents in fashion industry is almost none. So you can see if you get hold of the shape, you can quite, quite safe to use it at this 167 degrees.
Physical fabrics from the European fabric supplier Swatch on now we have the sun. Why we shouldn’t have it. I recorded this on the air court yesterday. so this means that these fabrics you can download and also order as physical and physical fabrics right away because they have all these in stock in Korea and WI with our industry.
We did a project last year together with with house Sandra’s sitting over here at house of you is is a print house here in the Netherlands for digital printing. So we took ten of their stock fabrics the sustainable stock fabrics and we digitized those meaning we measured all the, you know, physical properties and got a bunch of numbers and typed them into Cloe to get that the drape and the feel and everything.
And then we scanned the textures. You probably know how this works. So then one could, before ordering any fabrics or fabric samples, one can apply that fabric on your design. And I thought this was suitable from a conceptual level because this, this is fabrics then that is for digital printing. And here we had a link also to House of Use.
You could go in there and download the fabric order of fabric samples and then apply your print sketches on your 3D designs before ordering and if fabrics there. Yeah, you get it at what I’m currently what I’m currently doing is sort of version two of the shareware project that we did earlier, which with now called open source production patterns.
So I rereleased a lot of the carpets. I hosted workshops with a number of different student groups, and I also invited others to contribute to build like an online open source rock pattern archive because there’s more. There’s we have these 700 garments in Tulsa Connect and there’s more in different CC traders and this sites where you can download 3D models.
But a lot of those styles, they are not made for physical production in here. I set up a manual, a PDF, that sort of goes through exactly how garment are, how I think a garment should be setting up in clothes to also so that you can also print out the pattern to use it. So this is very dry.
You just go through everything with not sure seam allowances, fuzing grading, point on measurements, everything. And then I want to ask all of you to join in and be this catalyst of change because this is going to happen sooner or later. You like it or not, all this information will be out there, so we better together put together this sort of a good base to work from because this will help them like trade secrets for 200 years now, it will be open for everyone, the patterns, and we can let it take ten years or we can just pull it together and have a good base setting up in, I don’t know, two years.
And so, so then right now we can see this this jacket you see here, it’s size, it’s just three sizes. And this is on background information and then one can download it. And this this comes as the really interesting thing. Do you know what this is? Have you seen this? Yeah, this is close Cloud three, this latest software called Ginny.
They released it as a beta before Christmas. It’s it’s only the you can say is a simplified version of the 3D interface in club And they also tossed in some of these cute avatars for animation games and online metaverse things. And it’s probably that’s probably what is going to be used for first. But this is this is sort of the this is the Snapchat version of garment design.
So here you can pull in any avatar and adjust the size of it and then they have some predefined garments. But you can also pull in any of the designs from our open source library and it’s out the grates on that avatar. So changes in size automatically and if you change the avatar, the garment is all together again.
So here we pull in. This is a bit scan on me and now it’s off. So I’m going to be another one again. And then the garment changes it again. So we and we still have the pattern in the background. We never see it. And you can do all the a lot of you can’t do everything because it’s still a beta, but you can apply textures and graphics and different frames and you can even change the, the shape here and the lines and everything and, and the padding is there in the background and for being a beta version, this works fantastically.
It doesn’t work too 100% today, but I would say it works to like well 90 95% and this out the grading workflow released that two years ago, it was pretty crap. Now it’s now it’s very good. We use that for our production. We still oversee the result, but we use it for for grading things for, for production and
I obviously was going to come here and talk to you about revolution, but with the discussion of the post-truth world, it feels like a counter-revolution.
Now, and it’s been a very peaceful and quiet revolution thanks to smartphones, thanks to social media and thanks to the vast amount of information. Now available online to anyone. And this resolution has allowed the new fields to grow. And I like to call this field online open source investigation. I can use it to influence the powerful. We can use it to challenge the powerful and we can bring them to accountability as well.
Now, I started Bellingcat because I wanted to teach people how to do this. It used to be that the tools of media production were in the hands of the media, and with the rise of the internet, that is no longer true with blogging. Starting in 2000 and social media started in 2004, and YouTube, which I think started in 2005.
Now the tools for media production have been given to the people formerly known as the audience.
This technique is it’s fantastic, but it’s very hard, I suppose, to say something before this started. But you already see, this is Bellingcat, the independent group of journalists. They managed to pinpoint the the name of the commanding officer that ordered the shoot down of the plane in Ukraine in 2014 by searching on Google Maps and Russian Facebook, for example.
And they talk about that then, yeah, how the media at work has changed due to access to other technologies and then again, yeah, I see this this jimny tool, that’s the first step towards something, towards something that could be seen as online design, open source design developments. And the these tools that it’s been earlier been like very secretively kept within the industry.
Now almost anyone will be able to then download a a 3D style and a pattern, change it, apply a print of the like, bring in a fabric which is also available in physical life and then render those images and put them up for sale. And still today, I mean, this is still on the eve of the software. You need a bit of skills.
We can compare it to when I started my first online store in in, in in 2009, I think, but costed €20,000 today. You could have started an online store while I was speaking here for like, I don’t know, €15 nowadays. And, and that’s where we will be heading for this. And then we see the rise of new sort of marketplaces online or communities and says, this is me at a factory, such an online community which Winstone and some other guys are are operating.
And can you just tell us quickly what this is? So Metaphor Factory is a community built on blockchain, and it’s not fashion native at all. It’s a bunch of tech guys predominantly, but the ethos in tech of open source is almost natural now. And we were moving into so we our marketplace for fashion community built fashion brands and we were looking for our first cut and so manufacturing.
So we, we actually found Rikard and his open source patterns and it was the only really the only thing that we found. And we actually downloaded Cloe and started figuring it out. And I think the the shock of their not really being open source is one thing. But the second part of it is, is it feels inevitable and it’s an amazing new consumer experience.
When the consumer is activated to be creative as part of the entire design process. And I feel like it’s a service to, you know, we talk a lot about consumers making choices and what is a consumer want. I think involving the consumer in the creative process of fashion is probably the quickest and most sustainable way to really the evolution of the industry.
Yeah, I guess you could see me at a factory that’s that’s an online platform where the people at that platform together curates the what’s going to be sold there. Yeah. And then two years ago, one year ago, I don’t know Winston then downloaded a Jaguar. We’ll come back to that a jacket and made this joint and so so what we’re looking at the we have now that we have open source production patterns, we have bigger physical materials.
We also have online open source design development tools coming up. We have new kinds of preorder platforms and digital communities of sales for this. We also have we within this online open source design developments and also other softwares. Parallel to this, we have digital out grading through the UV mapping, meaning that if you change the avatar, the garment automatically change in the UVA mapping.
And then we have local micro factories. And yeah, I think I can’t tell exactly where this will be leading, but I think if we look at what happened to the music industry, we can start sort of trying to imagine where this will be. And I don’t know, it might not. Yeah. And this is sort of there’s this jacket.
Then there’s another jacket with a print design by Winston Solar Metal Factory sold on preorder of produce those with a cute US label I ever seen that Winston design which Winston to the left and me to the right holding a pair of scissors so yeah this is my sketch of what we might be facing then that we will have digital creators supplying us with open sourced patterns, print design, whatever it could be.
We have bigger physical fabrics. We might then have bigger physical curators picking things out of this and putting up things for sale in digital communities. Some preorder when we reached when you sold, say, 100 garments, then you could we can produce those and in a factory or small factory and there we have this automatic UV mapping engraving meaning that we can have 100 individual sizes and we can plot those out in one, lay on a single ply cutting machine, and we can have a production being almost as efficient as a traditional garment production.
And then I think if this should really work out, we should we should try to set up some sort of smart contracts here, meaning that when if a garment is created, is sold like that, part of that revenue should go back to the digital creators through some sort of blockchain set up exactly how that would work out. It’s someone would work that out.
And then before went back to Bowie and what he said, we listen to it once again. I think that we’re moving into a time when music will be fully available in the same way that or electricity is from the Internet. When broadband becomes the order of the day everywhere, which won’t be that long, it can only be a few years away.
When that finally happens, it will I think it will obliterate the idea of the record industry at the moment, changing, and I think the emphasis on what music is to our lives will change. Some of the character, the nature of it. And I think that artists themselves will find that they have to fall back on performance to provide them with incomes, because I don’t think the music will make them any like, I don’t know the question if is it smart contracts that the dishonest will have to fall back on?
Royce is something else and all the information is out there and is it relevant to compare fashion brands to record labels? And we’re probably going to see, you know, just as we’ve seen in the music industry, we have loads of parallel tracks in there. Somehow we still have the kind of old, old music is still out there. We still have commercial artists being being sort of set together by record labels and promoted in a similar way as they were earlier.
And then we have independent music and other types of music also from a esthetical point of view being created your section. And so yeah, thanks for listening. I believe we also have we have time for some questions
Echo Do you ever worry about big High Street or like fashion giants using patterns that you pop open source?
No. Why should I? I don’t know. Maybe it sounds nice to have, like, independent designers or like, the smaller community using it, but you don’t worry about it. I’ll bet everyone’s already been doing that for a long time. And it’s not only the big sort of high street fashions and also the the couture or the sort of the designer labels.
They buy things from H&M and knock those off to get basic basic fits. It already works all the way back and forth. So and everyone who’s claiming something else, they’re lying. Thank you. That was really inspiring is that I also think it always develops because you say, Well, this is the sketch for the future by then. Okay, we go that direction and then there will be another sketch.
So it’s it’s always developing. So there’s never an end to that. That makes it interesting. And also not a problem to copy, because then after that, there will be something new. Yeah, of course this is only one sketch and we will see parallel things developing. And of course what I’ve been outlining here is not replaceable straight away in an upscaled level.
But then the making of Tesla wasn’t either in the beginning, and a lot of people said that it would never be possible to make that car on an upscale level and we’re all going off and the end of the industry desperately needs to to be changed. And I didn’t go into the environmental facts here because I know you’re all everyone of you already know those things.
Yeah. I also thought it was kind of interesting with the artist part being more reliant in the music industry of concerts and events and started to think about what will the events and fashion industry go? What type of collaborations will there be like when everything becomes open source this then other parts will also be more important, I think.
And what is your thoughts about that? Like one ways and events in general and the other? That kind of that’s the question. What what will still be there to pay for if everything is available? And I think eventually we might only be buying into production capacity. That’s why I started a factory. But I know it’s it’s it’s a tricky question where we’ll be heading.
And I think one point of view from a creative point of view, it’s fantastic that you can have access to different things. And yeah, of course, from another point of view, I think that’s problematic. But then there’s a lot of things which are problematic that we need to handle and these things aren’t happening tomorrow, but we should be aware of all of those.
What is there and the pioneers of these movements, they are probably not sitting here, but there are some tech geniuses somewhere. And the the I would say that the successful players in the fashion industry or the future, that will be they will come from the tech industry and we will see, you know, we will have like at the Airbnb saw fashion or players coming in from from the side and several of the big brands will manage to make that transition of several others will be replaced by by other coming in with other other kinds of solutions that we haven’t seen before,
