Digital Textile Printing & Fast Fashion: Designed to Disrupt

Epson's Textile Innovation Centre was officially launched earlier this month in Lutterworth, UK. 

Central to the launch was Epson's creation of the first ever Textile Academy, a platform designed to inspire young people to help build a better, greener textile industry.

Manufacturing Digital was in attendance and, through workshops held for textile design students from Nottingham Trent University (NTU) and a series of executive presentations, observed the advantages of digital textile printing. 

Advantages which have the potential to disrupt the unsustainable business model of fast fashion- something which Epson, a manufacturer with a longstanding commitment to sustainability is equally enthusiastic about.

"The textile market globally is US$1837bn of textile business," said Phil McMullin, Head of Sales Commercial & Industrial at Epson. 

"From an Epson point of view what really excites us is that less than 10% of production at the moment is actually produced in a sustainable, digital way. There are huge opportunities here to change this."

These opportunities were interestingly not capitalised upon when digital textile printing was first invented, bringing us to the origins of fast fashion.

The surprising origins of fast fashion

Digital textile printing (DTP) was first created in the late 1980s as a replacement for the more laborious and environmentally impactful method of analogue screen printing. 

The development of dye-sublimination printers in the early 1990s made DTG ( direct-to-garment printing) possible, enabling colourful and complex designs to be mass printed onto large format rolls of textile.

Expanding on the development of DTP, Duncan Ferguson, Managing Director and VP of Commercial and Industrial Printing at Epson also discussed in his presentation how it arose in conjunction with fast fashion- and the irony behind the emergence of this highly unsustainable business model. 

"Fast fashion when it started around 20, 25 years ago came out of a desire to encourage people to be more sustainable," he explained. 

"It started to stop waste. The idea was that by printing digitally, you only printed what people needed. 

You printed closer to the point of purchase and the time of purchase and didn't buy huge volumes of screen printed fabric from Asia and ship it over along with waste."

He explains that this concept of fast fashion was unfortunately interpreted by many resale brands to enable the high-volume printing of low quality clothes, leading to frequent return sales. 

"I personally like to call it disposable fashion rather than fast fashion," Duncan continued. "But unfortunately, that's the way the market has gone.

"And this is the result: 92 million tons of discarded clothes and by 2030 we are expected to throw away 134 million tons a year."

Today, DTP technologies possess the potential to disrupt this model by challenging something integral to its rise and unsustainability: its scale. 

This was evident in what Taranpreet Rai, Corporate Sustainability Manager at Epson UK had to say in her insightful presentation.

Unsustainability linked to scale

Manufacturing Digital interviewed Taranpreet previously in our December 2024 magazine, where she shared insights on Epson's lean sustainability philosophy. 

At the event, she expanded on how on-demand digital textile printing will help create a more sustainable future for industry and business. 

She highlighted how on-demand digital textile printing rapidly reduces the amount of water waste involved in the creation of garments, something which Epson previously investigated in a Pan-European study that revealed that as much as 35 trillion litres of water is needed to produce the combined number of clothes in UK wardrobes. 

Within this presentation she also expanded on a critical question many outsiders have when it comes to fashion: why is it such a notoriously unsustainable industry? 

"Most of it is down to the scale of it," she said.

"All of us in this room will have more than one garment, more than one pair of shoes, more than one coat etc. For this reason because there is such a large scale of it there is an equally large scale of demand as well.

You'll have customers who will buy something you've created, and you'll want them to come back and buy something else. For that reason there's pressure on the designers, on the retailers to meet that demand.

"And often when there's that much pressure, when you have a deadline that's imminent you're going to cut some corners.

"You're going to neglect some things. And part of that is where that unsustainability comes in." 

DTP: Disrupting fast fashion by scaling things back

Garments can be printed on demand from anywhere at any time, with the design data kept digitally secure.

This technology enables us to reimagine textile factories entirely in the post-globalisation era, creating new opportunities to nearshore operations and avoid the unpredictability of global supply chains. 

The mass exploitation that defines fast fashion- of the workers paid a pittance used for cheap factory labour largely in South Asia, the Middle East and Africa- can be disrupted. 

So too can the scale of emissions, mass energy consumption and water waste that these offshore operations create. 

Textile manufacturers through DTP can be a critical part of boosting their national manufacturing economy, designing a new approach to the factory that aligns with Epson's overall approach to design. 

" Our design philosophy revolves around making things compact, very high-precision and energy-saving," added Duncan during his presentation.

" That's not a new thing, that's been Epson's design philosophy for well over 20 years. So when we talk about Epson having a sustainability agenda, we are talking actually about how we design things."

The future of manufacturing sustainability is rooted in interrogating design.

How can we make the design of that process, that system, that model more sustainable?

Through technologies like DTP manufacturers could reinvent the textile factory, reinventing the industry and subsequently changing the sector as a whole. 

To read more in-depth discussion of Epson's DTP solutions and how they're changing manufacturing, make sure you check out the upcoming May 2025 edition of Manufacturing Digital, which will feature exclusive interviews with the three Epson executives featured above.

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