Adapting to the market A trend which is a gift to shoppers, though, is highly challenging to textile printers who must supply the patterned material to make attractive but affordable clothes and furnishings. Dunand says print runs are getting ever shorter since shops don't want garments and furnishings to go unsold as trends move on.
The problem is that current printing technology is not well adapted to increasingly fast fashion. Normally once a designer has created a pattern for a textile (whether on paper or on a computer), a screen - with holes where the ink goes through - is made for a printing machine and each image often requires more than 8 screens (one screen per colour). "When printing, when you need to change screens, you need to stop the machines, so half the time the machines are stopped", says Dunand.
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