What if you didn't have to buy new clothes for a growing child every couple of months? A new fabric, inspired by solar panels and satellites, means baby clothes grow as a baby does.
"We have limited resources on Earth so we need to be clever about how we use them," says engineer Ryan Yasin, 24, the UK winner of this year's James Dyson Award. "Because this is seven sizes in one, you're not buying, manufacturing and transporting seven times as many garments."
Yasin's Petit Pli clothing expands to fit children from six to 36 months. This is possible, he says, because the material uses the Negative Poisson’s ratio. If you pull the pleated garment along it's length, it will grow along its width simultaneously.
Established in 2007, the James Dyson Award is an international student design competition with a brief to create something that solves a problem. Yasin will receive £2,000 for winning the UK round of the competition. The international winner, who will receive £30,00, will be announced on October 26.
Yasin was inspired by his two-year-old nephew, who kept growing out of the clothes he bought him. "Usually in children's wear brochures you see these little angels, but we are designing clothes for little rugrats who are running around, exploring," he says.
He also believes his garments could challenge a reliance on fast fashion. "If you start raising children with this clothing, they they won't have that readiness and willingness to keep buying new clothes," Yasin says. "Children are used to outgrowing their clothes but it doesn't have to be like that. We can be more resourceful."
Yasin has a degree in aeronautical engineering and is a graduate from the Royal College of Art. This interdisciplinary background, he says, helped to inspire the project "It gave me different insights into the fashion industry; people aren't used to engineers coming into this quite archaic industry."
The fabric is also heat-treated to make it last longer, hydro-phobic and windproof. Petit Pli was the result of over 500 prototypes, but Yasin isn't stopping there. His team are working on making a garment out of a single material, so that it can be as recycled more easily.
Yasin will use his winnings to expand the business and help bring a small range of products to the market. And, he says, a lot of those sales could happen online. "Typically, only 30 per cent of children's clothes are bought online. That's because of concerns about buying the right size, so as my product is good for seven sizes, this worry is removed."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
