Prints of the City : It’s the heat, baby. High-temperature technology plus new fibers, inks and dyes make designs such as flames roar to life on fabrics that can fit like a second skin.
The moment Jean Paul Gaultier’s prints on sheer stretch fabrics arrived this spring in local stores, cash registers began to sing the hallelujah chorus.
Now, the leggings and T-shirts that leave the impression of a full body tattoo are almost gone. And so are the loose tunics and pants covered in African prints by Yohji Yamamoto, and the stretchy tank and slip dresses imbued with flames and aspens by Todd Oldham.
When the latter images first appeared on a New York runway last fall, they were powerful--and uncomfortably timely. Oldham’s photo-sharp flames coincided with the Malibu wildfires.
Gaultier, who showed his spring collection in Paris, also seemed to have Los Angeles in mind. His Ts, ripped and shredded just for the runway show to reveal the models’ real tattoos, made it hard to distinguish where the shirts ended and the skin began. Where bodies are buff, second-skin clothing is second nature.
But the secret to these garments’ selling success is their evocative prints--the result of recent innovations in fabric manufacturing.
The new designs rely on heat-transfer printing, a process in use since the ‘70s to produce flame-resistant children’s PJs, among other things. In the past few years, that technology has combined with new fibers, new ink and dye combinations and computer-generated images to create extremely intricate, multicolored printed fabrics, as well as fabrics that look like molten metal.
The changes have been dynamic enough to lure high-end designers back to polyester. Yes, the same nasty leisure-suit fiber that gave all synthetics a skanky name is behind most of these printed fabrics. But it has been refined, rewoven and renamed micro-fiber. DuPont was the first to introduce “micro denier polyester” in the United States in 1990. Its brand, Micromattique, now has a slew of competitors, says company representative Eleanor Walsh.
Soft, silky and as light as gossamer, micro-fiber takes to prints like Ansel Adams. It can be woven into anything from stretchy velvets to translucent sheers. New dyes with colorfast pigments, often combined with inks, permeate the strands and enable these extremely sheer fabrics, or heavily textured ones, to be printed. And only the most sensitive fingers can detect the petrochemical slickness that exposes micro-fiber’s lineage.
The beauty of heat-transfer printing on sheer fabrics, such as French designer Gaultier’s, is in the way it saturates fibers. “It doesn’t crack or disappear when the fabric stretches,” says Jim Stewart, manager of trend direction for Hoechst Celanese, an international fabric manufacturer. In contrast, the previous generation of print dyes sat on top of fabric like a scab and worked only on a narrow range of fabrics.
To achieve his flame print, New York-based Oldham took Polaroids of a campfire in his native Texas and sent the photos to his San Francisco-based graphic designer, who enhanced them on a computer. The tweaked art was then filmed, and the transparency sent to Holt Manufacturing in Burlington, N.C., where it became a paper transfer. (A crude form of paper transfers are T-shirt iron-ons.) The flames--in full color on paper transfers--were then applied to pre-cut fabric.
“The prints can be engineered to a cut piece. If a customer wants a print or a stripe to fall on a garment in a certain place, we can engineer the stripes to always fall on that particular spot,” says Holt representative David Carter.
The paper-transfer process is also used by Mia Manners and Richard Sharpe, transplanted Londoners who have set up shop in San Francisco under the label Deep Space Time. The duo has perfected a holographic transfer print, with graphic images similar to those on credit cards. Their molten silver fabric twinkles with a thousand three-dimensional reflections.
Bono of the band U2 wore a Deep Space Time holographic suit on tour last year, and several British bands have adopted the look for their stage gear.
“Our fabric is very connected to the dance and techno music scene,” says Manners, who uses her holographic heat transfers on rayons, velvets, heavy fleece and cotton knits. “It works best under bright, bright lights, like disco lights or sunlight,” she says, “and it would be most spectacular on ski wear and swim suits.”
Her vision of silver swimwear is right on.
“In the past week the phone began ringing,” says Thadine Haner, a Los Angeles-based textile stylist for North Carolina fabric manufacturer Guilford Mills. “It was swimwear manufacturers looking for any fabric that has shine and silver.”
While such evening-wear fabrics as velvets, silks, satins and metallics are scaling down into the sportswear realm, Stewart says, silks are being printed to look like tweed.
Heat transfers, he adds, “are an easy way for designers to do a fun print.”
The method is being employed at all price levels of fabric manufacturing. But graphically innovative designs are just beginning to show up in the high-end market, so the trickle-down effect will take awhile.
Stewart’s job is to predict the future of fashion, and he is willing to gaze into his crystal ball to see when moderately priced yet graphically interesting prints will arrive. “We’ll start to see it by next fall, but it will really pick up for fall of ‘95,” he says.
