Robots: changing the garment industry

Every year the organisation called Fashion Revolution organises a week when people are encouraged to ask the question "Who made my clothes?".

This BBC article explores the changing nature of the fashion industry and the potential for the answer to that question to become "a robot" before too long.

Instead of sewing the clothes together, which is how clothes are generally assembled, a firm called CreateMe has come up with a solution: to glue the clothes together instead. Or bonding as they call the process, as it sounds a little better. This can also be done using robots.

CreateMe has designed robots that do this and the firm is already making women's underwear this way. It will begin producing t-shirts, too, in the coming months. Mass production could follow next year.

The garment industry faces a lot of challenges.

As the BBC article says:

Roboticists have eyed the garment manufacturing industry for decades. If machines could ever take over such work, clothes-making could come back to countries in the West, and the environmental footprint of garments might be slashed in the process. But millions of textile workers could also be out of a job.

I didn't know roboticist was a word.

As it says though, millions of low paid workers could be affected by this technology... one of many jobs that technology may replace in the years to come. I am perhaps heading for retirement at exactly the right time...