A Colour Selection System to Better Inform the Colour Forecasting Process

Colour forecasting is a process where attempts are made to accurately forecast colour for fashion-related products that consumers will purchase in the near future. Seasonal colours are recognised as a powerful driving force of fashion-related products and consumer research of desires and preferences has become an important integral part of design and marketing processes. Trend forecasts are marketed globally by forecast companies to many fashion-related industries in order to increase their market coverage. They do not take into account colour acceptance levels of target markets on which fashion-related industries focus their design and marketing efforts. The information they sell is broad and generalised, even so, they claim to aim for 80% accuracy in their predictions. In a previous study, the anticipation of consumer acceptance was identified as the weakness of the current colour forecasting process. An improved system model, which replaced the anticipation stage with consumer colour acceptance data was conceptually developed and tested. In order to generate sales on the high street, this improved process requires accurate knowledge of consumer colour acceptance which would entail additional cost and time for the fashion industry to implement. It is therefore critical for a tool to be made available that does this part of the process for them. Hence, this research proposes to establish a framework necessary to develop and provide such a colour selection tool that will enable the users of colour forecasting information to generate colour ranges for their products that will have greater consumer acceptance. The tool will enable fashion companies to take control of their own colour forecasting process through the colour selections they make for their ranges. Essentially the tool will benefit the UK fashion industry’s competitiveness in the global market and assist waste reduction (unwanted goods) that impact on the environment

Doubly periodic textile patterns

Knitted and woven textile structures are examples of doubly periodic structures in a thickened plane made out of intertwining strands of yarn. Factoring out the group of translation symmetries of such a structure gives rise to a link diagram in a thickened torus. Such a diagram on a standard torus is converted into a classical link by including two auxiliary components which form the cores of the complementary solid tori. The resulting link, called a kernel for the structure, is determined by a choice of generators u and v for the group of symmetries. A normalised form of the multi-variable Alexander polynomial of a kernel is used to provide polynomial invariants of the original structure which are essentially independent of the choice of generators. It gives immediate information about the existence of closed curves and other topological features in the original textile structure. Because of its natural algebraic properties under coverings we can recover the polynomial for kernels based on a proper subgroup from the polynomial derived from the full symmetry group of the structure. This enables two structures to be compared at similar scales, even when one has a much smaller minimal repeating cell than the other. Examples of simple traditional structures are given, and their Alexander data polynomials are presented to illustrate the techniques and results.Comment: 27 pages, 22 figure

An application of queuing theory to modelling of melange yarns. Part II: A method of estimating the fibre migration probabilities and a yarn structure simulation algorithm.

A queuing model of staple yarn structure was presented in Part I of this work, where the migration behaviours of fibres were simulated by the movement of customers in a Markovian network of queuing systems. Part II of the series proposes (i) a multi-dimensional minimization method for estimating the migration probabilities of fibres based on the analysis of the distribution of number of fibres in yarn cross-sections; (ii) a yarn structure simulation algorithm which uses the migration probabilities of fibres, yarn technical specifications (e.g. linear density and twist) and colour composition to produce a realistic three-dimensional image of a melange yarn. The result is a high quality three-dimensional image of a melange yarn showing its fibrous structure as well as the formation of hairiness. Due to the generic nature of the model and the simulation algorithm, this approach can be applied to a wide range of yarns including ring-spun or open-end spun yarns of solid shade or produced from melange blends. Further improvements to the proposed model are discussed including the application of inhomogeneous Poisson process and the analysis of energy relationships which govern the migration behaviour of fibres

Underwired brassieres

Underwired brassiere