In the context of fashion/textile innovations towards Industry 4.0, a variety of digital technologies, such as 3D garment CAD, have been proposed to automate, optimize design and manufacturing processes in the organizations of involved enterprises and supply chains as well as services such as marketing and sales. However, the current digital solutions rarely deal with key elements used in the fashion industry, including professional knowledge, as well as fashion and functional requirements of the customer and their relations with product technical parameters. Especially, product design plays an essential role in the whole fashion supply chain and should be paid more attention to in the process of digitalization and intelligentization of fashion companies. In this context, we originally developed an interactive fashion and garment design system by systematically integrating a number of data-driven services of garment design recommendation, 3D virtual garment fitting visualization, design knowledge base, and design parameters adjustment. This system enables close interactions between the designer, consumer, and manufacturer around the virtual product corresponding to each design solution. In this way, the complexity of the product design process can drastically be reduced by directly integrating the consumer’s perception and professional designer’s knowledge into the garment computer-aided design (CAD) environment. Furthermore, for a specific consumer profile, the related computations (design solution recommendation and design parameters adjustment) are performed by using a number of intelligent algorithms (BIRCH, adaptive Random Forest algorithms, and association mining) and matching with a formalized design knowledge base. The proposed interactive design system has been implemented and then exposed through the REST API, for designing garments meeting the consumer’s personalized fashion requirements by repeatedly running the cycle of design recommendation—virtual garment fitting—online evaluation of designer and consumer—design parameters adjustment—design knowledge base creation, and updating. The effectiveness of the proposed system has been validated through a business case of personalized men’s shirt design.

This paper put forward a new interactive design approach for customized garments towards sustainable fashion using machine learning techniques, including radial basis function artificial neural network (RBF ANN), genetic algorithms (GA), probabilistic neural network (PNN), and support vector regression (SVR). First, RBF ANNs were employed to estimate the detailed human body dimensions to fulfill consumers’ ergonomics requirements. Next, the GA-based models were developed to generate the formalized design solutions following the consumer profiles (demands). Afterwards, the evaluation model was established to quantitatively characterize the relations between consumer profiles and garment profiles from the generated design solutions. The design solutions would be digitally demonstrated and recommended to the consumer following the evaluation results in descending order. Meanwhile, the PNN-based models were created to predict garment fitness based on virtual try-on. Moreover, the SVR-based self-adjustment mechanism was built to estimate and control garment design parameters according to the consumer’s feedback. Based on these mathematical models, the approach enhances the interactions among digital garment demonstration, the designer’s professional knowledge and the user’s perception to find out the most relevant design solution. The effectiveness of the new approach was verified by a real application case of leisure pants customization. The results show that the proposed method can powerfully support the designers’ quality personalized design solutions for consumers more accurately, fast, intelligently, and sustainably, compared with the existing approaches. More importantly, it also establishes an effective and reliable communication channel and mechanism among consumers, fashion designers, pattern designer, and garment producer.

Nowadays, the popularity of the internet has continuously increased. Predicting human body dimensions intelligently would be beneficial to improve the precision and efficiency of pattern making for enterprises in the apparel industry. In this study, a new predictive model for estimating body dimensions related to garment pattern making is put forward based on radial basis function (RBF) artificial neural networks (ANNs). The model presented in this study was trained and tested using the anthropometric data of 200 adult males between the ages 20 and 48. The detailed body dimensions related to pattern making could be obtained by inputting four easy-to-measure key dimensions into the RBF ANN model. From the simulation results, when spreading parameter σ and momentum factor α were set to 0.012 and 1, the three-layer model with 4, 72, and 8 neurons in the input, hidden, and output layers, respectively, showed maximum accuracy, after being trained by a dataset with 180 samples. Moreover, compared with a classic linear regression model and the back propagation (BP) ANN model according to mean squared error, the predictive performance of the RBF ANN model put forward in this study was better than the other two models. Therefore, it is feasible for the presented predictive model to design garment patterns, especially for tight-fitting garment patterns like activewear. The estimating accuracy of the proposed model would be further improved if trained by more appropriate datasets in the future.

The fashion industry is facing increasing pressure to move toward sustainable development, especially with concern to cost and environmental sustainability. Innovative digital technologies are regarded as a promising solution for fashion companies to resolve this issue. In this context, this paper put forth a new 3D reverse garment design approach embedded with a garment fit prediction and structure self-adaptive adjustment mechanism, using machine learning (ML) techniques. Initially, the 3D basic garment was drawn directly on the scanned mannequin of a specific consumer. Next, a probabilistic neural network (PNN) was employed to predict the garment’s fit. Afterwards, genetic algorithms (GA) and support vector regression (SVR) were utilized to estimate and control the garment structural parameters following the feedback of fit evaluation and the consumer’s personalized needs. Meanwhile, a comprehensive evaluation was constructed to characterize the quantitative relationships between the consumer profile and the designed garment profile (garment fit and styles). Ultimately, the desired garment which met the consumer’s needs was obtained by performing the routine of “design–fit evaluation–pattern adjustment–comprehensive evaluation”, iteratively. The experimental results show that the proposed approach provides a new solution to develop quality personalized fashion products (garments) more accurately, economically, and in an environmentally friendly way. It is feasible to facilitate the sustainable development of fashion companies by simultaneously reducing costs and negative impacts on the environment.

This paper proposes a probabilistic neural network-based model for predicting and controlling garment fit levels from garment ease allowances, digital pressures, and fabric mechanical properties measured in a three-dimensional (3D) virtual environment. The predicted fit levels include both comprehensive and local fit levels. The model was set up by learning from data measured during a series of virtual (input data) and real try-on (output data) experiments and then simulated to predict different garment styles, for example, loose and tight fits. Finally, the performance of the proposed model was compared with the Linear Regression model, the Support Vector Machine model, the Radial Basis Function Artificial Neural Network model, and the Back Propagation Artificial Neural Network model. The results of the comparison revealed that the prediction accuracy of the proposed model was superior to those of the other models. Furthermore, we put forward a new interactive garment design process in a 3D virtual environment based on the proposed model. Based on interactions between real pattern adjustments and virtual garment demonstrations, this new design process will enable designers to rapidly, accurately, and automatically predict relevant garment fit levels without undertaking expensive and time-consuming real try-ons.