Design
Choosing Between Zippers, Buttons, and Snaps: A Closure Decision Guide
How designers weigh garment type, cost, durability, accessibility, and looks when picking garment closures.
Type Magazine
The Edit
A Career Guide to Working in Retail Today: From Sales Floor to Buying Desk
The ladder still exists, but the rungs have moved. Here is how the paths from selling to buying, merchandising, and store leadership actually work.
The Edit
The Gadgets Quietly Changing Getting Dressed
Smart mirrors, body scanners and fabric recyclers are moving fashion tech out of the factory and into the fitting room.
Cut & Construct
How clothes are built — and which builds last.
Design
Design
How Fabric Grain Direction Shapes the Way a Garment Hangs and Stretches
Warp, weft and bias behave like three different materials. Cutting a pattern off-grain quietly undoes the fit a designer drew.
Materials
How Wrinkle-Resistant Cotton Works, and What the Resin Costs the Fabric
Wrinkle resistance in cotton is achieved by cross-linking — a resin finishing process in which a chemical, historically a formaldehyde-releasing agent, forms covalent bonds between neighboring cellulose molecules so…
Retail
Retail
How Planogram Software Decides What Goes on Which Shelf, and When
A planogram is a retailer's diagram of every facing, shelf level and sequence in a fixture — and the reason two stores in the same chain look identical.
Retail
How Retail's $849.9 Billion Returns Channel Works, and Why the Fees Arrived
Returns now run at 15.8 percent of U.S. sales and 19.3 percent online. Mail-in fees price the reverse leg, and California's textile EPR law prices what happens after it.
Retail
BOPIS Operations Inside the Store: The Real Cost of Order Pickup
Buy online, pick up in store looks free to the customer and costs a store a sequence of small labours: the pick, the stage, the handover, and the occasional no-show.
Technology
Technology
Digital Wardrobes: What Virtual Clothing Actually Is, and What Wearing Means Online
A garment made of pixels never touches a body. That changes what design, ownership, and getting dressed mean.
Technology
Why RFID Took Over the Stockroom, and What It Replaced
A tag that costs dimes and reads through cardboard rewrote inventory accuracy — the system shift, from the GS1 standard to Walmart's mandates.
Technology
How Item-Level RFID Tags Rewired the Apparel Stockroom
A passive radio tag sewn into a garment now does what a barcode never could: count an entire rack without a single item leaving the shelf.
Style News
Style News
How Federal Rules Dictate Every Word on a Clothing Care Label
A garment's care tag is not packaging copy; it is a federal disclosure governed by two separate regulations, a registration number, and a standardized symbol system, all enforceable as consumer-protection law.
Style
How Durable Water Repellent Finishes Work, and What the PFAS Bans Change
A durable water repellent, or DWR, is a surface finish that lowers a fabric's critical surface energy so rain beads and rolls off instead of wetting the yarn.
Style News
Uniqlo's July Lounge Drop Tested the Post-Volume Basics Formula
The retailer's July 2026 loungewear and underwear collection leaned on streamlined basics, per Hypebae coverage — the latest sign that volume basics are being re-specced, not just restocked.
The Atelier Report
Business News
The EU Agreed to Make Fashion Brands Pay for Their Textile Waste
Extended producer responsibility for clothing is set to land in every member state — and the fee schedule, not the principle, is where the margin moves.
Innovation
How RFID Tags Track a Garment From Warehouse to Sales Floor
Item-level RFID tagging is a system that embeds a passive radio chip in a garment's price ticket or woven label so a reader can identify that single unit without a hand scan of its barcode.
Fashion News
The $2 Wage Rise Against the $9.99 Price Floor: Summer 2026 in One Number
Cambodia's 2026 garment wage rose $2 while union demands ran $22 higher; Bangladesh's base held flat. The price floor above them has not moved either.
Business News
How RAIN RFID Tags Let a Stockroom Count Itself
A passive tag with no battery, read from meters away, is why apparel retailers can now count a backroom in minutes instead of a day — and why the same chip is turning up in blockchain pilots and returns fraud checks.
Latest Stories
Materials
How Lyocell Fibers Are Made, and Why the Solvent Recovery Rate Matters
8% of that solvent is recovered and put back into the next production cycle, according to the company's own technology documentation .
Design
How Item-Level RFID Tagging Is Rebuilding Inventory Accuracy in Apparel
A decade-old barcode problem is being solved chip by chip, one hangtag at a time.
Technology
Whole-Garment Knitting Produces a Finished Sweater in One Cycle, With Catches
Machines from Shima Seiki and Stoll knit complete tube-shaped garments with no seams and no cut waste, while design constraints and machine cost keep the method in a defined product niche.
Design
Ease Allowance: The Centimeters of Math That Decide Whether a Garment Fits
Fit is body measurement plus ease, and the numbers chosen for that second term — often under five centimeters, sometimes negative — encode everything a garment intends to do.
Fashion News
From Saks in January to Papaya in Spring: The 2026 Chapter 11 Ledger
Apparel dominated the year's retail bankruptcy filings — Saks Global led in January, per the coverage Moody's and analysts flagged — and mid-2026's ledger shows the stress is structural, not seasonal.
Style News
Why Brands Keep Renting Heritage Mills: The Cat Footwear x Harris Tweed Model
A certified mill's cloth carries a legal guarantee no marketing copy can match, which is why the heritage-mill collaboration has become the industry's credibility purchase.
Technology
Size Recommendation Engines Decide From Data You Already Gave the Retailer
Fit engines blend a shopper's dimensions, past returns, and cohort behavior into one size call, and the strongest signal turns out to be what similar shoppers kept.
Retail
Retail Staffing Hours: How Stores Actually Build and Cover Shifts
Behind every covered register is a scheduling system balancing traffic curves, labour laws, student timetables, and the persistent gap between the plan and who shows up.