By Indu Sood

• Fashion Design Faculty

“Fabric is the most extraordinary thing; it has life. You must respect the fabric.” – Hubert de Givenchy

When we talk about fabric we come across many things like the types of the fabric, the techniques and many times simple physical comfort is the most important aspect of all.

Let us clear one thing first, when we refer to fabrics here we are strictly discussing about materials/garments used for covering the human body. So when we think about any material covering our body we prefer something that suits our body, gives us comfort and fulfills all our demands related to wearing.

We divide fabric into two parts that is weaving and knitting. And if we talk about weaving, it is generally a very expensive affair beginning from fiber to yarn and many other subsequent finishing processes which includes comfort, ease of movement and many more aspects according to their purposes.

While knitting is also a costly technique, machinery-aided finishing process while making knitted fabric and garment is relatively faster and economical than weaving. The selling price of any garment varies drastically depending on a number of factors such as- the production process related to making fabric, process of making garments and their finishing and other related aspects. Thus, we can easily compare the production cost of the garments made by these two different techniques.

 And when we speak about comfort of movement, knitting fabric is way more comfortable than weaving fabric because knitting fabric gives independency to our bodily movement whereas weaving fabric obstruct the natural body movement at many places. For instance, if you wear a semi fit pant and try to run fast it is almost impossible but if in case of a knitted track pant that become easier for me to run fast.

To draw up a conclusion on discussion of fabric, we can safely say that there are a wide range of fabrics readily available in the industry and it entirely depends on us that how we choose the right fabric for the right occasion.