History of Apparel Engineering

Apparel manufacturing wasn’t professionalized until the advent of World War II, it was the demand of the military war effort, and the need for established procedures and protocols in uniform and related accessory production that brought Apparel industry, kicking and screaming, to some standard practices. During 1980’s there were huge units running, basically in bundle movement or make through system of manufacturing. Each and every operations need to be finished inside the factory itself. But now a days, due the decentralization of activities, we run lesser quantity of operators for getting the same rate of production. The production of ready-made clothing, which continued to grow, completed its transformation to an "industrialized" profession with the invention of a practical and commercially viable sewing machine in 1850s.

Even before the invention of the sewing machine, the ready-made garment industry relied on a system of "putting-out." As early as the 1820s, clothing manufacturers contracted work to female workers who would do the job for wages 25% to 50% less then that of male tailors. Rather than working in the clothing shop, the women seamstresses would complete their assigned sewing tasks in their homes. The ethnic composition of the seamstresses mirrored the general trend of immigration to New York City. Prior to 1850, most seamstresses were German immigrants or native born, poor Americans who had come to New York from rural areas, while from 1850 until the 1880s Irish immigrants dominated the industry.

In the 1880s the nature of the garment industry experienced another significant change. Immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe replaced seamstresses, who often worked alone or in very small groups, with contractors. Under the new arrangement, factories produced the fabric and the designs, which were then distributed to contractors on credit. The contractor was responsible that the fabric that he had acquired on credit be made into clothing, and then sold to stores and other retail outlets. He (it was almost always a "he") hired neighbours and other women in the area to do the job. The contractor paid by the piece, though he could refuse to pay for work he considered shoddy. As factory machinery became more sophisticated in the 1870s and 1880s, parts of a piece of clothing could be mass produced and women working at home did finishing work rather than making whole pieces of clothing from scratch.

By the end of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth century the putting-out system gave way, for the most part, to "sweat-shops." In this system, manufacturers provided the raw materials, designed the clothes, and marketed the final product, but the work of making the clothes was again handed over to contractors. The contractors would now secure a workspace, sewing machines, and ten to twenty workers, usually female immigrants. Each worker had a specific task to perform but was paid on the basis of how many garments the whole group was able to produce. By the turn of the century, most ready-to-wear clothing came from such shops.

By the starting of the new millennium, a new business concept, world open market, has been evolved, at that time global products, imported or domestically manufactured are also came to market, because of this increased competition, a need of low cost high quality garments in market evolved. When thinking high quality the cost automatically raised, this imbalance made the production planning crew to think of the new method same as in mechanical production industries have to be implemented in the apparel production also. Every industries started their own methods of engineering and cost reduction methods. But most of them are only concentrating in production planning, and line balancing methods to control the waste.

This lack of system in production control rarely supports to the manufacturers in reducing their cost, but most cases the engineers are unaware of the control methods, to overcome this difficulty I am putting effort to coordinate and consolidate the methods and systems which have to be used in the Apparel Engineering for the proper reduction and control of the waste and improved production planning and profit to the industries, for the first time.

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