The Bunka Gakuen University, hosts of the 16th IFFTI conference in Tokyo, took the member participants on a select industry tour on the last day of the conference. The tour was an extremely wonderful experience and was conducted very well.
Miyamoto Textiles (Miyashin) was purchased in September 2012 by Bunka Gakuen to become the Bunka Fashion Textile Research Center. Before this, the company had a long history of development and production, for famous Japanese brands such as Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, Mina Perhonen, to name a few and some of its materials are exhibited in the permanent collection in The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)..
At Sugimoto Pleats we had a chance to see the entire fabric pleating process from fold design to execution. In this 60 year old company they create both hand-pleated and machine- pleated fabrics. The owner of the factory walked us through the subtle differences, and told us a bit about the changes in the production methods over the years.
Noguchi Senko (Noguchi Dyes) is a family-run Indigo Dyeing operation that has been in business for eight generations. They started as dye makers, but now they also make stencils and do the prep work as well.
We not only had the opportunity to see the dye vats, and to see the house in which they did all of the stencil work, but also got to individually indigo dye a sample print!
The Digital Human Research Center is a facility which engages in development and applications of that allow for measuring, analyzing, simulating and predicting human functions.In a collaboration study with Bunka Fashion College, they have developed a new dressmaking dummy based on the average dimensions of actual humanbody forms.
Compiled by Benoy Thoompunkal