Epson partners with Japanese fashion designer

Epson has partnered with famous Japanese fashion designer, Yuima Nakazato, to showcase the possibilities of inkjet and dry fibre technologies used on recycled clothing.

Nakazato’s self-titled brand YUIMA NAKAZATO will be shown at Paris Haute Couture Fashion Week Spring – Summer 2023. The collection showcases creative and sustainable fashion, created using a “potentially industry-transforming textile production process”.

Epson’s dry fibre technology, which has been used commercially to recycle office paper, requiring virtually no water, has been adapted to produce printable non-woven fabric from used garments.

The production process was unveiled in Paris as part of a three-year collaboration between Epson and YUIMA NAKAZATO, which utilised the process for the first time at Palais de Tokyo runway show on January 25^th, 2023.  

The upcoming Paris show will illustrate how switching to digital textile printing using more environmentally friendly pigment inks offers the fashion industry a more sustainable and less wasteful means of textile printing.

Hitoshi Igarashi from Epson’s Printing Solutions Division, explains: “Although in its early stages, Epson believes its dry fibre technology combined with pigment ink digital printing could offer the fashion industry a much more sustainable future, significantly reducing water use while allowing designers the freedom to fully express their creativity.

“Epson’s environmental vision is committed to contributing to a circular economy, and this development could be one step towards achieving this. Dry fibre technology applied to the fashion industry offers the possibility of producing material for new clothes that have been recycled from used garments.”

The fabric used to create the latest fashion line was derived from material from used garments sourced from Africa, the destination for many discarded garments from around the world. Nakazato visited Kenya where he collected around 150kg of waste garment material that otherwise would have gone to a “clothes mountain”, a large pile of discarded textiles.  

After sourcing the materials, Epson applied its dry fibre process to produce over 50 metres of new re-fiberised non-woven fabric, some of which was used for printing with pigment inks with Epson’s Monna Lisa digital printing technology.