Re: [silk] khadi vs. open source

[Dave Long]

_clothes_ unlike cloth are customised, but (khadi or not) are rarely  
open source, since altering them typically requires reverse engineering.  
the quality of this, as anyone who's gone to an indian tailor to alter  
or create something will attest, is variable.

When my wife was helping out with theater costuming, the head of the  
department pointed out that back when weaving was a significant economic  
activity, most sartorial cultures weren't willing to waste any of that  
hard work and based their clothing around different ways to fold  
rectangular pieces of cloth around non-rectangular people[0,1].

however, clothes, unlike cloth, could potentially be open source - if  
the stitching patterns were attached in a lable like the cleaning  
instructions, and stitches were designed to be easily removable.

One issue (with respect to the variable results above) is that, like  
providing or omitting symbolic information in libraries, different sewing  
techniques lead to alterable and inalterable clothes.  Sewing machine  
stitches may be more or less removable[2], but the serger, which is easier  
and faster and hence more popular, yields relatively inalterable seams.

-Dave

:: :: ::

[0] when we went sari shopping, the shopkeepers in LA seemed to be very  
happy that we were looking for clothes intended for wear (as opposed to  
cloth destined for interior decoration), and spent a fair amount of time  
teaching their particular techniques for wrapping a non-rectangular person  
in a rectangular cloth.
[1] on another list, it was pointed out that guys, being less  
non-rectangular than women, have an easier time buying stuff off the shelf  
-- so one explanation for fashions of the last several years is that they  
allow women's clothes manufacturers to construct simple tubes, because  
their customers should be happy when they stretch to fit.[3]
[2] a check in the closet reveals that my trousers expect to be worn long  
enough for me to get fat, but not my shirts.
[3] an egregious misuse of technology: scan your client, then custom-print  
a fabric under a transform so that after it's been darted and gored and  
sewn, the pattern appears unbroken.  ("developing" a 3D surface onto a  
flat pattern probably started with tailoring, became more formal in manual  
drafting techniques for sheet metal work, and currently finds itself  
implemented in software to uniformly texture skins for CG models)